My goodness – it’s been a long time since we wrote anything here. It seems as if we’ve been away forever. As we warned you last time, we’ve been away in the States all this time – some very good times, unfortunately, a very sad time at the end of our stay and then some very good news we received yesterday.
The first part of our trip to the States was excellent – I’ll fill you in with all the details and a plethora of photographs later. We spent a few days in Hanover, New Hampshire with my mother and brother Steph and his wife, Hope, and then flew to Atlanta to spend a couple of days with our good friend (and the best man at our wedding), Jordan Ryan. We hired a car and raced around the South in a grand loop – Memphis, Natchez, New Orleans and Montgomery, Alabama before returning to Atlanta and a flight back to Boston for another visit with my mother.
We were about to make the trek over to Lake George to visit with my brother Sandy and his family when we had an e-mail from our Ben in Los Angeles – his wife Donna had been rushed into hospital on Tuesday evening where she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia and bleeding in the brain. We quickly amended our plans and got on the first flight from Boston out to LA where we spent the next twenty-four hours with Ben and her in the Neurological ICU at the UCLA hospital. Sadly, Donna died on the Thursday evening – a staggeringly sudden and devastating blow.
She had been feeling poorly for a couple of weeks and had taken a couple of days off work. On the Tuesday evening when Ben came home they were chatting and Donna started speaking gobbledygook. Ben thought she might be having a stroke so called for an ambulance and she was taken to UCLA. Her white blood cell count was astonishingly high and an MRI showed lesions and bleeding on the brain. She lost consciousness and was sedated but her condition unfortunately continued to deteriorate through Wednesday and Thursday and she died just before 9.00 pm.
The suddenness of her illness is still difficult to comprehend. Ben had joined us for a few days on our trip to New Orleans – Donna hadn’t felt well enough to come as well. During our visit we had been texting and e-mailing her wishing her a speedy recovery from the flu-like symptoms she was experiencing. Within a week she was gone and has left a huge hole in our lives.
Many of you knew Donna. She was a very, very smart young woman, certainly one of the sharpest knives in the drawer with a wonderfully witty sense of humour. We’d last spent time with her and Ben on our trip to China last October for Adam and Ava’s wedding and we had a wonderful, wonderful time. She was very much in to the whole China experience and spent many a happy hour wandering through the streets and alleys of Yangshuo soaking up the atmosphere and thoroughly enjoying herself. We shall miss her very much.
We stayed in LA with Ben for another two weeks helping him through a dreadfully dark time and finally came back to the UK on Thursday of last week. We arrived home to a garden which had gone pleasantly mad in our absence, especially the wisteria and “Forget Me Nots”. This is, of course, the first Spring we’ve spent at Framington House and it’s a joy to see what presents itself in the garden for our pleasure and enjoyment. Aside from the four hours required to mow the lawns, it’s very pretty.
And then, on Saturday morning, we had an e-mail from Adam in China with the splendid news that our second granddaughter had arrived, born earlier that day in Liuzhou, on Pen’s birthday. That will make it really easy for me to forget not just one birthday on 28 May, but two! Her name is still to be determined but she will always be known as “Fiji” to me, for reasons of which Adam and Ava are well aware. Naturally, the proud grandparents are delighted.
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Much love to you all,
Greg