It became the fact all of a sudden that she had been some kind of manic-depressive her entire life, it kept from us when we were children, and now being adults and privy to all these secrets that revealed themselves at their own pace, we could ask what else, what else and there would be nothing until one day did you know that me your own mother was almost adopted? It was kept disguised beneath her old age and by the fact that she was our great-grandmother and I wondered if for her pretending might have been some temporary placebo because until I began to know I had no inkling. But as a thing goes on suppose that there is one thing it will inevitably be and so by some strength of paranoid will she told herself You are having a stroke and so the doctor explained that despite all the images of her skull in its relative health that on some plane of thought or being she had basically had one. And there was no difficulty believing the concept coming into her shared room in the Hospital on that first day and being at peace with her imminent death, knowing her age and the various miseries she had suffered and further imposed on herself, to find her sitting upright in an unconscious anguish and at some stage before or after the episode she had taken to her hair with a frantic pair of scissors and had perspired so intensely that the dye in her hair seemed to erode the edge of scalp along her forehead. We lingered around her bed and declined one another the offer to here sit, here, here and moving out of the way so that we all remained standing and an empty stool stood with us. Her daughter, my grandmother, recounted that she had been lucid the night beforehand but it came in waves of course and some days she was here and others she began to ask the strangest and most repetive questions which you could never be sure if she knew that she had already asked them. She remained sleeping the entire time but still we agreed eventually to let's leave her be so she can get some rest and her daughter, my grandmother, showed us the way to the cafeteria where I began to wonder how would she be at such an age and was she nursing her own dormant insanity waiting to weave its own imaginary trauma and during lunch she laughed that now she would be an orphan like all the rest of them and while laughing she began to weep I almost thought inconsolably until she stopped and laughed again at the sillyness of it all and she took my hand that had taken hers and thanked me and saying with her grasp that Would you look at me like this? Look at where and who and when we are, her time is come is all, what am I crying about? She was crying because her Mother was dying.
She liked to tell stories, my great-grandmother, about my great-grandfather who even my father hadn't met. He was a young man and handsome who had enlisted with all of his friends to fight in the war when it was in effect and what he was was a larrikan in that service that had no place for his good spirit which she said never broke despite what horrors she could image that he had faced and which she said he had never spoken about except that he had returned with the sword of a Japanese officer which could have spoken to any number of exactly hows. These stories were always best to hear their first time told when we were still children and when she would visit every year or so and in good graces accept her daughter, my grandmother's teasing which reminded her of him. Queer to think about it now and to see that at night's in the lounge room lit comfortably by lamps shaded at different intensities they each played their part in painting some other picture of her that hid her instability and working in tandem with her to pretend that how we, the children, saw her was how she was. So when counting her stories of my great-grandfather I run out of digits on my hand with which to mark them she told me about how he was a war hero deprived of his rightful rank by a superior bitter that he had risked his own life under gun fire to save a friend and had earned written accolade in some published bit of non-fiction. Or how when he had returned and was driving the car which belonged to the city council, which due to working in it from monday to friday he felt entitled to, how when they drove he spotted at the top of a tree a nest of some kind and he swung the car off the road and hopped out, his passengers, my grandmother, her brother and my great-grandmother I could see falling out after him, sitting on the bonnet and watching while my grandmother who the family agreed inherited his larrikan spirit chased after him now barefoot and climbing the tree to its top where he found the nest and came down and showed them all, this sect of three, showed them these little birds which were such a wonder of the bush. But we had returned now to her room, where we sat inside her curtain drawn around us in the shape of a square and we watched  her convulse and she groaned like the sound of some low note pluck carelessly on a guitar and played in reverse, I wondered who he was truly and who truthfully was anyone dead longer than a number of years?