He watches when you're sleeping.

So on Christmas eve for the first time in my life I was the witness to someone’s will. It was a very strange experience. I’m up in the country at my parents house and my whole family is there for Christmas. For the first time in a few days I was alone in the house for about five minutes when the phone rang. It was a friend of my parents, someone whom I’ve known for years whom I shall refer to as David. His wife, a very good friend of my mothers, is currently in the last stages of her life after a hard fight against a particularly aggressive cancer. “Are your parents home?” he asked, but not like that, we made small talk ‘n’shit. I told him that weirdly, both of them were gone. “The thing is,” he said, “is that we need a witness to sign Janets will. Are you busy? I’ll come over and pick you up and we can do it now.”

“Of course,” I replied, “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

I hung up, brushed my teeth and removed the comb from my hair that my niece had stuck there as a centrepiece earlier that morning when she had styled my hair into some sort of exotic sculpture.    

He arrived, picked me up and we went to his house. As we arrived a person who I did not recognise was throwing up into a plastic bowl as another lady dry retched into a garden.

“David, help Janet” yelled the lady in the garden between retches. I realised that the person who I had not recognised was in fact Janet, a woman whom I had had known for nearly twenty years. The disease had ravaged her body. Her once blond hair is gone, now she has a short grey fuzz. To say she looked thin would be understating the severity of the toll it had taken on her. David took her bowl, emptied it and bought it back while I stood there in shock. I asked if I could do anything, “Just take a seat inside, I’ll be with you in a minute” David told me. I went inside and sat down. After a while Janet came inside and we signed her will.  Under my occupation I put ‘unemployed’, in reflection it seems rather disrespectful. Then David drove me home. We chatted briefly on the two minute drive, about how he was starting to accept her death and all the legal rigmarole that they had to go through, how he and Janet had only recently started to talk about the fact that she was dying. We arrived home and he left, I went out the back of the house and saw my mother and I couldn’t hold it in any longer and I cried. I hugged my mother and I felt how tiny and thin she is, like a little bird. When I was at the Alfred I saw lot of very very sick people but it didn’t seem to bother me so much, but seeing someone that I knew, someone whom I considered fairly robust whose health had been attacked so savagely broke my heart. I thought of David on the drive home, completely manic, pushed almost to the brink of insanity watching his wife fight and lose. Watching her die and being completely and totally unable to do anything about it. I thought of my mother and how she had watched her best friend die slowly over the last few years and how before that another one of her friends had died a fairly slow and painful death. My mother is a very small woman and I don’t know how she manages to bare the weight of it all. We were talking and she said that Janet only had a few weeks left of being lucid before the drugs took their toll. “She will probably die of a chest infection. The cancer doesn’t get them, their immune system is weakened and something else gets in”. Her voice was almost totally empty, I say almost because in the depths you could hear resignation and a deep, deep sadness.

Christmas day was one of the best Christmas’s I’ve ever had. There was food and 4 generations of my family around the table and hardly any ring ins. Just my sister and her kids one of whom has a kid of their own (my grand nephew), my cousin, my folks and I. There was a retarded amount of food and all I did all day was smoke joints, eat ridiculous amounts of food and fall asleep in my chair. I also pooped a lot. I think I ate too much food which I didn’t know was a thing. I felt fat happy and content for most of the day. It was nice.

On boxing day one of my other cousins came out and stayed the night at my parents house. He’s a weird kid, I can’t deny it. Sometimes I think he might have a learning disability and other times I think he might be one of the most profound people I’ve ever met. One time we went to the pool together and I said that I hated pissing in the pool because I felt like I was just pissing my pants. He sat there quiet for a moment and then said, with all solemnity, “It’s not just your pants you’re pissing though is it, it’s every one else’s”. From that moment on I took great pleasure in pissing in the pool, knowing full well that I’m not just pissing my own pants. Anyway, so this time we hung out and at one stage we were hanging out watching the ducks. I looked over at him and his brow was furrowed like he was thinking deeply. “What’s up?” I asked him. “Have you ever wondered what a duck would look like with a monobrow?” he asked. I wondered how he had arrived at that particular platform on his train of thought, had he started with regular hair and worked his way down or had he started at eyebrows and then thought ‘Ah ha, monobrow, fucking nailed it”. Anyway, he had stayed the night and in the morning we were sitting with my mother having a cuppa when we heard the front gate clang open, my ma went around the corner to investigate and then we heard her call “Boys, can you come and help” so we leapt up and ran around and there was my mothers neighbour bawling her eyes out with a dead dog in her arms. My cousin bravely took the dog from her arms and I ran to grab an old sheet to wrap it in. My mother drove her neighbour to the local vet where the neighbour insisted that the vet listen to its heart in case it was just unconscious. There was no hope, the dog was well and truly dead. I could tell before they left by the tiny bugs that had stuck to its eyeballs.  

So that’s my Christmas, bookended by death, with babies and food in between. We still have no idea what killed the dog.