My friend James Grantley Rathmell "took up the state's kind offer of voluntary assisted dying (VAD)" last week. In the email that arrived the next day, he told us that he "always intended to slip away quietly". In the same week I exchanged contracts on Wentworth Falls, marking the release after 40 years of that house where my mother and grandmother lived and died, and my grandfather's ashes were scattered. The day after that sad email from Jim, my beloved and irreplaceable iMac failed, taking out the circuit breaker and scrubbing an almost-finished 200-hour battery measurement on the Pi. To complete this horrific week, my old lecturer and friend Hansen Yee was found dead in his bed, a day before we would have met for lunch. Meanwhile, I have been visiting my friend Bob in the last days of his cancer. One does not get shitstorms like this very often.

Jim had four children; one daughter refused to speak to him for many years. My daughter Amelia has not spoken to me for many years now. As best I remember it, our last conversation (after lunch outside The Marigold?) went like this:

A: You left us, dad.
J: No, you left me... don't you remember the day you and your mum left Sydney?
A: No...
J: You were crying. I was crying. You told us you did not want to leave. Your mum was bundling you into her car for the drive to Brisbane. That day is burned into my memory, I can see your face vividly.
A: No, I don't remember that at all.
J: I guess you were about 4 years old.
J: There was nothing I could do.

TMD is a cross between Ghost (1990) and Ghost Town (2008); A ghost and friends haunt his (early? Is that what a dead person would call people still living?) partner until she learns to move forward and begin to live her life again.

I am writing all this out to help me cope. In brief moments I can see the connections that join all these things. A need to grieve, a need to let go, and a time of remembrance and regrets.

One more story pops into my head.
I do not remember this story, but I remember my mother telling it to me. I was about four and a half years old. My father disappeared out of my life. I was apparently inconsolable. My mother called doctors. My grandfather showered me with presents. I don't know the symptoms, but I was obviously seriously disturbed. This story explained a different memory---my mother bending double after tasting my medicine to prove to me that it was not as awful as I claimed. That event did stick in my memory... perhaps because it let me know that grown ups were not always right. It lent credibility to the greater issue that I do not remember.
I attribute my 'teflon skin' to these events, but I determined that I would never abandon my own children, and I didn't.