It has been a year ago when my life was unraveling in such high speed I couldn’t catch my breath..

I was in a work trip in Vietnam, a trip from hell nonetheless where I got food poisoning at The Continental Hanoi, that rendered me helpless for two days in my hotel room, whilst on the other end of the world my beloved Eddie was dying.

Dominic, my pillar of strength through this last year, a virgin when it comes to surrounding himself with dogs, found himself in the most awful position to have to run my Eddie to a specialist, to hear he is rapidly dying of cancer and that the only compassionate thing would be to let him go. No, there was no time to wait for me to return from Vietnam.

I remember feeling helpless and then very little comforted by the thought that the last Friday before I took the midnight flight to Hong Kong, I took Eddie to the park and we sat on the grass for an hour as the sun was setting, clutching him tightly in my arms, trying hard not to bawl my eyes out and alarm him.

On the 22nd of August Dominic called me in Vietnam to tell me that our vet was coming by that evening to set him free from all the suffering.  Then, before I even had time to process that information, I got another piece of news this time from my brother:

My dad had a massive stroke after news that my mom was loosing the battle to Lupus hard and fast instigated of an unnecessary surgery doctors took him through.

Still trying to process everything, I had to make it through to India to finish the business my company wanted me to do. Don’t ask me why.

Sitting alone in a “hotel” that I dreaded to touch anything and sit or lie on anything (the best in the “town” I was at) I find out my dad never woke up from the stroke. He passed away.. a giant of a man whose light was just switched off, very quietly and with little fuss. 

I remember those last few days on the trip, scrambling through India from the barren and poor South, to Mumbai, where I was trapped in the middle of the night in a local taxi, wet from the water pouring in through the roof, while he was chasing down someone after his car was hit while I was in it and me screaming at the back seat in English to someone who didn’t understand and didn’t know English and quite frankly didn’t care if I missed the midnight flight from Mumbai to Hong Kong. 

Racing through unknown streets, pitch black and rain pouring down like it had never rained before, trying to talk reason to someone who didn’t speak my language, being trapped as he drove through back alleys around the airport, lost in a huge city I had no bearings of, while white big stray dogs where looking at the car through the darkness and the garbage. Calling my husband frantically, just to tell him I was scared for the first time in my life, that I actually might not make it home.

That night when I reached the business concierge of my flight that was greeting us outside the airport, I was in pieces. I was in mourning, hungry, wet, sleepless, angry, confused and felt absolutely lost in the middle of the world with my only compass being Home.

I remember screaming at them and the taxi driver, I remember being ushered into a private lounge and given the key to a shower in first class.. I remember copious amounts of alcohol.

I don’t remember much else of the following few days.. only getting home and hugging Dominic, crying over a dog tag that I was clutching tightly in my fist while walking Oliver, and a lot of phone calls with my brother. 

Then I was in an airplane again flying, then in transit, then flying, then in transit again, then flying. Reaching Greece in a daze, confused and upset.

I remember seeing my mom, a wisp of a person in a bed, in a room not isolated enough for someone with a 0% immune system. The shock in my brother’s voice, the pain, my mom’s dreams through the morphine calling her brother, her sister and my dad, the shudders as the pain of Lupus was gripping her tightly..

I remember the last day I saw her, she was looking out the window, lost in morphine, unfocused but somehow very determined and sad. I remember driving out to their home the last day I saw her, jetlagged, tired, sleepless, angry oh so angry, and yelling alone in the car pounding on the steering wheel repeating what my mom had told me earlier “Cock-suckers”.

I went that night to their home.. abandoned, my dad’s sandals still by the door, lit every single candle in the house and screamed to the universe to let her go. Just to let the pain stop.

When I received a phone call the next morning, some staff person from a clinic run by my mom’s cousin, a person that I hardly knew, to tell me she had passed away, there was nothing left to say or feel.

So.. some people asked me what where those two video links I posted and named European V American.

The reality of it is very banal; I couldn’t put the two video links in one post and I wanted to juxstapose the cultural difference: For American it is “I drove all night” for Europeans it is “I would walk 500 miles”.

I shall continue with more posts of the sorts.. I welcome ideas if you have them!