A Weekend Away

20 October 2008 Friday evening Matt and Bron arrive to look after our place for the weekend. Saturday morning we gave them the run down of what to feed to who and when and then we packed the car and left. Our first stop for the day was to visit Joy in Auckland. We arrived to discover her in her room feeling extremely fatigued and not up for visitors. We ignored her protests of tiredness and put her in a wheelchair and went exploring. We were only there for a couple of hours and unfortunately the weather was crappy so we didn’t make it outside. However there are some lovely communal areas in her resthome and we hunted some of them out. We moved from area to area, staying a short time in each. The more we talked the more it became obvious that Joy’s tiredness wasn’t a physical problem so much as a mental one. She started to open up and voice concerns and it all slotted into place. I explained to Joy that she was suffering from stress, caused by a number of factors, including her inability to accept the change. When we made our way back to the 3rd floor and parked ourselves in the lounge overlooking the pond Aaron and I started some straight talking. In essence we told Joy she needed to snap out of it and accept that the change was inevitable and wasn’t going to be reversed. We told her to stop treating her room as a prison cell and to start getting out and having fun and making friends. She listened, as grandmothers do, and even managed the odd smile. It was a start. After nearly 2 months of sitting in her room and hating her circumstances we told her it was no longer acceptable. She protested. She told us her room needed to be reorganized and until someone could help her with that she felt unable to leave it. I had Tuesday off work so Aaron volunteered my services. I’ll be honest, my initial thought was “How the hell do I get out of this?” but the deal was done and I accepted that it was pure selfishness for my own time that made me want to say “No I can’t”. I told Joy I would definitely be back on Tuesday morning. An Evening Wedding We said goodbye to Joy early afternoon and made our way back over the bridge to Jo & Phil’s. After a quick catch up we got ready to attend Aaron’s cousin’s wedding at Allely House in Kumeu. It was a formal event so meant dressing up. Aaron borrowed Phil’s wedding suit again and I fortunately still fit the one formal winter outfit I own. It was a wet and windy day, which turned out to be not so conducive to an outdoor ceremony. As the bride was about to make her first step up the garden aisle the heavens opened up and proceedings automatically halted until someone made the decision to move everyone indoors. The men in suits were willing to brave it but the women in summery outfits weren’t so keen. Despite the sudden change of plans the ceremony proceeded indoors quite well and overall the wedding was a very pleasant affair and Aaron and I stayed until the very end. Around 1:30am we arrived back at Jo and Phil’s and crashed for the night. We left the next morning after breakfast. A Morning With Joy Tuesday morning my alarm went off at 2:45am. I got up and had a shower and got dressed. Aaron went and fed out and then we drove to Aaron’s work. It was a chilly 4am start and I was not looking forward to my drive into Auckland. It’s been 2 years since I braved the Auckland motorway and the thought of fighting my way through lanes of peak time traffic to get to Remuera created a knot in the pit of my stomach. Aaron gave me a tour of his work, not that it was operating that early but that was fine, and then I left for Auckland. Obviously I was way too early to visit Joy so I had pre-arranged for Phil to leave his front door open so I could drive straight to Glenfield and then crash on the couch for an hour or 2. Jo and Phil got up after 7am and so I made myself breakfast and hung around until 9am before leaving. The drive to Joy’s was long and slow. Interestingly I reverted to instant road rage when 3 cars pushed in in front of me on the merging lane as I attempted to get onto the motorway. You can take the girl out of the city… When I made it to Joy’s she was still waiting for a nurse to come and shower her. She wanted me to wait as well but I explained that I only had the morning and as we weren’t leaving her room I thought we should get stuck in. She reluctantly relented and set to helping me. However, I insisted she sit down and just fire instructions at me and I would do all the work. So, for the next 2 hours I removed virtually every piece of clothing from her 2 huge dressers and her wardrobe and Joy categorized her collection. My parents tell me she has only taken a fraction of her clothing from her house and yet she must have had at least a hundred outfits. Each outfit had to be sorted by season, colour and personal preference and placed in drawer or on hanger in a particular order. It was a long process but despite reports to the contrary, Joy was very switched on mentally and made the process relatively painless. Numerous times we were interrupted by staff. It irritated me in the extreme but I understand it’s necessary in that environment. Perhaps it wasn’t so much the interruptions themselves so much as the way the staff spoke to Joy. Why is it people automatically adopt a different tone of voice when speaking to old people? It’s that simple, child-like tone full of false sentiment that just makes me want to scream “For f*** sakes she’s old not retarded!” With clothes finally sorted and put away I reiterated to Joy that she wasn’t living in a cell and was running out of excuses not to leave her room. “You have to get out and enjoy yourself Joy” I told her. I wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear me. In the end it wasn’t a long visit and all a bit business-like really, but as always I had other stuff to do. I needed to get to Dunninghams to buy some more butchering knives. I rang Aaron and he gave me instructions on how to get there but in the end I took a right too early and ended up on the motorway heading north. I got off the motorway at Khyber Pass and made my way to Atomic Coffee in Kingsland. I’d arranged to pick up some more Hessian sacks. I ended up with 31 in total and then had to make my way through the top of the city to Pitt Street. After about half an hour of endless traffic light stops I eventually made it back on to the motorway and eventually ended up in Puhoi about 15 minutes late.