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Parents have a special tone of voice when they tell you someone you care about has died. It’s a hushed tone caught in the back of the throat, the way you would use a sing-song stage whisper to a child about to have a meltdown over a pack of Tayto in Tesco. Trying to limit the damage even though you know there will be tears either way.
I had heard my dad use this voice before when I was 8. It was to inform me gently but firmly that Snowy the dwarf rabbit, a beloved and equally feral member of our family, had died.
When he rang me one evening last May I counted on my fingers to see what time it was in Australia. It was early morning. Not the hour for a "how ya going" chat.
It's the call everyone dreads but it's more complicated for immigrants. If the call is 'they've taken a turn' then you're searching Google Flights for the next flight
“Now dahlyn’ I’ve got some bad news. . .”
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I panicked. There are no more rabbits in the family left to die. Only people.
It's the call everyone dreads but it's more complicated for immigrants. If the call is "they've taken a turn" then you're searching Google Flights for the next flight. Making hasty deals with whatever deity you believe in (and some you don't) that a delay or a missed connection will rob of holding someone's hand for the last time in a hospital. The fastest flight from Ireland to Australia is 24 hours. Even if you leave the airport right this second, the chances are slim.
Then the pandemic hit. Airlines stopped flying. Borders closed.
Back in March 2020, Australia closed its borders and introduced a two-week mandatory hotel quarantine for everyone entering the country. The army picked you up from the airport and took you to your hotel, and the police made sure you stayed there.
I’ve been asked why the Australian government was able to take such a hard and fast stance. My undercooked answer is the country lives in cycles of emergency. It is not uncommon for half of it to be on fire and the other half flooded. For better or worse, an action is taken. Hotel quarantine coupled with other measures kept the death toll low, locally acquired cases sit at zero in most states for weeks and now the footy has 30,000-strong crowds.
But it stranded 40,000 Australians overseas. About 300,000 of us living abroad in total as the government bottlenecked people’s returns by placing an arrivals cap at 6,000 per week.
I am one of the lucky ones, really. I sat tight.
Then my uncle died. I checked flights. Instead of 24 hours I was now five weeks from home with quarantine and overbooked routes. I would not make the funeral.
Instead I read the eulogy Dad had written for his big brother over an email. I know he had tapped it out, painstakingly with two fingers so that I could read it. I still do not know what to say to my cousins who lost their dad. Whatever I tried to write sounded trite and secondhand on Facebook Messenger. Sorry I have not been more in touch.
I live in fear of losing a grandparent now. I am unusually lucky that I have three sets. My mother’s parents separated before I was born and I picked up their new partners along the way. Some members of my family have called my grandmother’s partner Len, as “Mum/Nan’s friend”, which is a bit rich considering they’ve been together for 30-plus years and share a bed. I call him Poppy Len because for years he has shown up to netball games, taped movies he thought I would like off the telly and brought me sweets when he visited. He is a retired English soldier. I do not know if this was my nan’s way of putting up two fingers to my Irish Republican grandfather but I enjoy the irony.
Len is terminally ill. It is a type of blood cancer. He has decided to stop some treatments. He is also going deaf. He cannot hear me over the phone but shouts “Lorve you” in his midlands accent when I do call, regardless.
When I said goodbye at Christmas 2019 we both teared up but pretended we hadn’t. Both of us thinking “is this the last hug?”
I cry because I can’t go home and I cry because my Irish grandfather will never get the chance to come “home” to the Liberties in Dublin.
Hotel quarantine is cruel. It has robbed me of time I might not be able to get back with people I love
“I’d just like one last trip home. Have a daycent pint and lisden to some musicians have a session, right?” he said sadly looking at the dry Australian beer in front of him as we sat at lunch last Christmas. He is in his mid 80s with a heart condition.
It is unlikely a doctor would sign him off for a long-haul flight.
Yet I daydream of him coming to stay with me. Taking a week off work so I can take him to the Dublin Mountains to breathe air without red dust in it. We would sit in a booth at the Lord Edward so he could hear the Christchurch bells and I would let him tell me I should stay away from Irish men.
“Jaysus Christ they wouldn’t know whad to do with you. Bedder to leave them off.”
I would buy him pints as payback for all the dresses with bows he bought me when I was little.
This year I asked Mum what he did on St Patrick’s Day.
"He put on the Wolfe Tones I think and got a bit sad."
Hotel quarantine is cruel. It has robbed me of time I might not be able to get back with people I love. But the trade-off is it has also kept them safe in a country that has so far contained Covid-19. My grandparents did not have to cocoon like Ireland’s elderly.
They were able to spend the time they have doing what they love. For one grandfather this is looking at other people's gardens and frowning at the state of their roses, and for the other this is testing the limits of how loud you can play the Dubliners in suburban Sydney before the neighbours come round. They have met new great-grandchildren and enjoyed every Easter, Christmas and birthday with my big and mad family.
That makes it all worth it.
But I will be on the first flight home.
I just hope they will be there to meet me.