Author: Veronica

This post has all the trigger warnings. Fire, palliative care, dementia, trauma, pet death.

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The last week has been hard. Nathan’s mum is dying, and we’re currently in the weird and wobbly stage of not knowing how fast this process is going to be.

Her dementia is well advanced, and unfortunately, her brain keeps forgetting to tell her legs how to work, and she falls.

Add in a nasty case of Covid (antivirals helped), a UTI, and a decent case of delirium and it’s been rough. We’ve been in close contact with her doctors, and they’re good – but sometimes there’s no magic pill to fix things. And dementia is already a rotten time, without covid. We spent Monday night in the hospital with her, and then helping settle her back into her care home. It’s been a long week.

Prednisone for her breathing has given her some artificial energy, but y’know. It’s all just time.

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I was awake at 5am, playing the fire over and over in my head, even as I bossed myself into thinking about other productive things and tried to fall back asleep. (The puppy trying to sleep on my head didn’t help really)

I’m not allowing myself to feel the losses yet. I keep pushing it down, because everything is still too big, too raw. Everything, gone. So much of everything, gone.

I am so sad this week, and I can’t pin down why. I mean, obviously, I know WHY, but what makes this week harder than any other week when my life is falling apart?

A friend sent me two boxes of books, and they were just so beautiful, and so kind, and it broke my heart and was also amazing and thoughtful and the books make me so happy when I pat them and rearrange them.

But I’m still so fucking sad.

I can’t seem to keep my brain from replaying Spark’s death. Finding his body under the ashes and metal framing of the couch. Curled up, hiding, dead from smoke inhalation before he burned, thankfully. From the sounds of the fire, and his screaming as he couldn’t find his way out.

Rubbing Tom’s ears and his burn scars. Walking Crumpet through his traumas (he let me give him SO MANY PATS just now, maybe he knows I’m sad). Maisy, too old to cope with the loss of everything. My darling kittens and the two weeks of horrific virus before everything burned. I was so tired, but we were WINNING for fuck’s sake.

And then kittens down my shirt and wondering if Flynn and Bea would survive the smoke, and crying when we found them alive.

It all just sucks. SO much.

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I tell people I foster cats for my mental health, and it’s true. I just went and sat with the current kittens (ready for adoption!!) and Tom and Crumpet, and stroked ears, and smooshed my face into purring babies, and remembered that sometimes it’s the small things that help.

It’s nice to have small purring distractions when everything is terrible.

I bought a new vegetable peeler – spotted in Coles, identical to my old beloved one. It made me incredibly happy, right up until the necessity of it made me sad. But, it peels vegetables like a goddamn dream.

I also bought a new potato masher, but we are NOT going to talk about that fucking atrocity of a thing. Sure, it’s sturdier than the last piece of kmart shit, but I feel my potatoes were more “beaten into grainy submission” rather than mashed, and the stupid little holes took forever to wash.

SO. We’re still on the lookout for a good masher.

In other news, everything remains exhausting and hard work. We spent Friday turning the one large middle room in the studio shed into two smaller rooms, because now that we’re the proud owners of a tiny bit of ‘leccy, Isaac couldn’t stand to sleep in the bus anymore.

And that’s fair – the kid beds in the bus are definitely “small child” sized, and Isaac is very tall and was sleeping squashed up like a pretzel.

It was A LOT of fucking work, but Nat and I moved the wall (honestly, moving the wall framing was the easiest bit – it was moving everything else that nearly killed me).

And then Isaac got home from school and looked at me and went LET’S BUILD A BED AND GET THIS SHIT SORTED and I died a little, but remember, pretzel sleeping.

So we built Amy’s new bed and I died about seventeen more times from exhaustion, and my hands wouldn’t work, but SUCCESS I have two teenagers sleeping in the studio bedrooms and one (almost) teenager still in the bus – but at least Evelyn still mostly fits into her bed. I think. I should ask her about that.

I found some excellent books at the op-shop the other day, and they continue to make me happy, even as I mourn the loss of ALL my books. I swear, half the burned ashes of our house were books. And y’know. All my other stuff.

We’re in a bit of limbo at the moment – Insurance is almost ready to pay out (FINALLY OMFG IT’S BEEN ALMOST FIVE GODDAMNED MONTHS) but we’re waiting for our mortgage holding bank (commbank) to work out whether insurance needs to pay out the entire sum of our mortgage first.

Messy, exhausting, and I do not like it. The property assessor will be out Wednesday to decide whether there’s enough market value left in our land to make the mortgage “safe enough” for commbank to hold onto.

Very fucking annoying, and exhausting, and stressful. Our insurance amount was small enough as it was (hideously underinsured, because running a business from the property involving oils made us a fire risk – which hahahahafuckingha it wasn’t even the business that started the fire, and I was still paying $300/month to insure less than half of our shit) and I really don’t want to attempt the rebuild with even less money.

Of course if that’s how it all plays out we will still rebuild, it will just be harder and tighter, and I will be much grumpier.

ANYWAY.

We have the electricity on, and we’re just waiting for TasNetworks to inspect and sign off on the initial works. We have a toilet and shower for the winter – even if I’m super mad that I am having to walk through the outdoors to pee AGAIN, I thought I was OVER that stage of my life. We have a new gas hot water heater to install, so hopefully the wind won’t make the hot water turn off repeatedly anymore – again, cold showers are not my idea of fun.

And the bus has heating, so here’s hoping we don’t freeze to death over winter. Hurray for not being in tents anymore.

In the meantime, go buy soap. I’ve been working (fairly) solidly (when I’m not exhausted from teenagers making me build beds) and (some) things are restocked pretty well.

Yay, soap. Also we ship to the US, UK, New Zealand and Canada now, even if the postage prices are eyewateringly grim. Sorry about that.

And thus passes another Friday, without Insurance finalising anything. I’ve been hearing “you’ll hear from us by the end of next week” for so many weeks in a row, the saying has lost all meaning to me.

I rang them today to chase things up, and was told they needed more time because they’d had to request an updated scope of works? Very annoying, and very frustrating. We’ve been back on the property for three months now (as of yesterday) and we’re more than four months out from the actual fire.

However, excitingly, we DID have the Aurora contractor come and install our electricity meter today, which means we are ONE STEP CLOSER TO ‘LECCY!!

I’ve let our electrician know we have meters now, which means next week he can make the magic juice flow through the power lines into my studio shed/bus!

Sure, half the light wires are still a little melty in the ceiling, so it’s not exactly a *small* job, but we might have power soon! SILENT POWER (well, as silent as electricity ever is). No generator noise, omg. Also no generator fuel bill (also OMG).

In other news, my gorgeous lovely foster kittens, Elsa and Yelana, are doing beautifully, and the cat netting arrived so I can rig up some sort of entrance to my studio from the cat enclosure, which will allow Tom and Crumpet to move inside.

In other other other news, my house insurance premiums are set to rise to $467 a month as of April, so omfg, I think I need to shop around. I hate to lose any insurance, but we cannot afford that.

Blech.

The grief comes in waves, and it’s always triggered by the small stuff – the things that ought to not be upsetting – not in the wake of something as enormous as this. But there it is. Today I am missing a potato peeler, as I struggled to peel potatoes and it took me 10 minutes longer than it normally would to peel potatoes for dinner.

Amidst everything, it’s that stupid white potato peeler which was consistently good and sharp for more than ten years. It’s my knives, some of which I’d had for more than twenty years, my hands worn into their handles. My space, my life, my rhythms.

I organised two new foster kittens last week, and they arrived yesterday. My husband worries I am doing too much, have too much on my plate, that I’m not resting enough. And he’s right, of course (don’t tell him) but it’s kittens or a nervous breakdown, and at least now I have hissy babies to kiss on their little heads, and something else to keep my hands and brain busy.

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I can feel the seasons changing, in the bite of the wind despite the sunshine. Autumn is here, and Winter is coming and I still don’t have mains electricity. It’s been twenty one days since insurance rang and said “we will probably have an answer for you early next week”. More days than it probably should have been since TasNetworks said “within five business days”. But hey, people are BUSY you know.

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We spent last week moving my mother in law into her dementia unit – early onset dementia is a bitch of a thing, and it’s breaking my husband’s heart. The transition went relatively well, considering, and some judicial application of sedatives helped a lot, but it meant no one else saw her at worst. That was a special kind of hell, saved for Nathan and I, as she begged not to be left, demanded to be taken home, told us she wasn’t staying, no thank you she was done now. And our hearts broke, but we did it anyway, because sometimes life is a bitter pill to swallow.

Sometimes you just have to do the shit things, even when you don’t want to.

But no, “she’s settled so well!” and “she’s so calm and relaxed” is all anyone else saw (not the nurses, never the nurses and doctors and the helpers and hand holders, not them). Thank god for transitional medications.

And we’re not dead yet, no one is dead yet, so onwards we go.

Edited to add: I’ve just mashed potatoes with the worst potato masher ever and now I’m mad about my burned potato masher too.

It storms. The wind howls and we say things like, “let’s hope we don’t lose power” while smirking, because there is no losing power right now – there’s either fuel for the generator or there isn’t. And maybe that’s one nice thing about this whole mess – not being beholden to a grid we cannot control. Maybe.

It’s been 15 weeks now, and I know I said a week ago I was hoping Insurance was ready to settle, but apparently “you’ll hear from us early next week” means: You’ll get a text update, saying we need to do four different things still, and get quotes and sign offs from three different people, and oh, yeah, it’s definitely normal to string things out this long…

Early on, when we were still in the airbnb, with twitchy fingers and bored brains, we started cleaning up the fire mess. Pulling down burned studio shed ceiling, and ripping out the burned insulation. This was after the asbestos clean was done, and we had a bare patch of dirt left where the house once stood, but the damaged shed was still standing.

People asked us, “but aren’t you insured? Insurance is the one who fixes everything! Why are you cleaning it up yourselves?” as we hired a skip, and sought out an electrician, and weighed our tiny budget against our needs.

and FIFTEEN weeks later, we know that nothing would have been done if we waited; our spaces would still be full of ash and debris and water damaged mess, growing mould and getting gross. Because absolutely nothing happens fast when you’re dealing with insurance. I wouldn’t be back able to work – to make and ship soap and fulfil wholesale orders. It’s just exhausting, and frustrating, and really fucking annoying to have everything move so slowly.

And yes of course we know this is a “major loss” and we’re all “doing our due diligence” but omfg. How are people meant to return to normal life?

But hey, at least we were insured.