I can't think of an appropriate title for this at the moment. I know a lot of people who read this - all two of you - already know, but on the off-chance that there are people who read that I'm not aware of, I'm going to explain my last post.

My nanny (for the non-Brits, this is my grandmother, but she wanted to be known as nanny. It's a British thing) has been staying with my family for the last week. It was my birthday, then my parents 25th wedding anniversary (and celebration), my sister's birthday, and my cousins were over from Australia, so we had her over for the week so we didn't have to fuss over travelling back and forth from her house to ours. She came the day after my birthday, when I was making the cake for my parents anniversary dinner.

And the anniversary dinner was cool, we had a room off the dining room of a hotel and ate a huge carver dinner (my role was feeding my youngest niece. She decided I was Spoon Filler.) and my parents hired a limo for the thing so that was cool.

And since it's crazy-celebration-week in my house, we'd been having Chinese and pizza and stuff. On my sister's birthday, we had an Indian. My nan had jacket potatoes instead, but she tried an onion bhaji (and asked if it was Chinese, so we all took the piss, because that is my family) and we all talked about the next day, and seeing my cousins.

The next morning, we all noticed she was sleeping in - because she has a replaced hip, she can't go upstairs and the best thing for her is our sofa-bed in the front room, so she's right in the middle of where absolutely everyone walks - and we all decided to let her. She's in her eighties, we were being nice. And time got away from me, and I realised it was lunchtime. As I was making my lunch, my brother walked in the room and said we needed to call an ambulance, because he'd just heard a weird noise from Nanny, and seen that she'd been sick and tried to wake her up. And I freaked, because I'm swell under pressure. He called the non-emergency number, figuring if they thought it was an emergency they'd push us right up the queue and I tried to get hold of our parents because that's about all I could do, and within about five minutes, an ambulance showed up. They tried to wake her up, and couldn't, so they put her in the ambulance, tried to bring her round again, nothing doing. So they took her to the emergency room and I kept my parents updated when I wasn't picking my boy up from school.

My sister and I decided that we'd try and keep his routine normal, as much as we could, just in case it was nothing. And (ha, my boss reads this, you will forgive me though) I went to work, and kept my mobile on me, texting my sister and asking her for updates. About 8 she told me she had to call, because she couldn't put it in a text. At that point I was pretty much like 'shit'. But I said I couldn't use the phone because I was working, and I couldn't leave work. I told her I'd phone when I finished instead, and she told me to go to the hospital straight after.

I did, but I called on my way out and my dad said he'd meet me there, and then he told me outside the emergency wing that Nanny had died about an hour before. She'd had a brain haemorrhage, and possibly a stroke, and she'd had a CT scan but there was nothing they could have done. She'd had the haemorrhage sometime in the early morning, before we'd all woken up, and at that moment it was already too late.

I can't get my head around so much of it. I'm trying to think of other things because it's like a giant puzzle I'll never manage. She'd haemorrhaged and would never recover in the morning but she was breathing when we saw her in the morning? She was only really dead at the time they called it? I don't know. And my nanny was like, so active and with it. It was really fucking sudden. We used to joke that she'd climbed out of the primordial ooze and would be around long after humans otherwise died out. And she called us all cheeky buggers, but it stemmed from something real. We never thought she'd go that way. I grieved for my Nain for years before she finally died, I saw her husband dying before that. My other grandfather was killed in a car accident, so even if I disliked the suddenness, it made some sense and allowed me to blame someone. But Nanny was different to them.

I'm blaming myself so badly for just walking past the bed, thinking I was being nice by letting her sleep. I recorded a show she liked for when she would wake up. But we all did it, and for the same reasons. It's hard not to feel culpable. But like my brother pointed out - if she was in her flat, she might not have been found for days, maybe weeks. At least in our house, in that room, she had a chance, if there was a chance. That makes it slightly easier. I don't like being in that room any more. And I was a bit of a dick to her the last few days, she kept coughing and I kept saying 'oh, die quieter, Nan.' It was meant to be a joke, she wasn't supposed to make a point with it.

What really throws me is that everyone has said it's a preferable death. It was quick, it was in her sleep. And this boggles my mind so much. She had a brain bleed, was she asleep at that moment? She was unconscious when we found her. And the times they're giving for the haemorrhage, it makes it sound like she spent most of the day dying. Like 15 hours. This is a quick and painless death? Her brain broke, her breathing was like a deep sleep, and there was so little dignity when we saw them cut away her nightie and attach pads to track her breathing and blood pressure. Why would that be preferable?

I will get back to blogging soon. Probably when I want to blank the whole thing. The next Supernatural episode will take me a little while, but not because of this. Nanny didn't die from an Indigenous American curse. At least they don't do peaceful deaths in Supernatural.