Every time I picked up the phone to call my grandma during the past months, I dreaded that she’d fall asleep on the phone again, that she’d again confuse names, that her speech again was slurred and that again, I would feel her health and her spirits deteriorating. I found excuses not to visit her – after all it is an eight hours drive away. But you can’t avoid your demons forever.

I took the red-eye to Dusseldorf yesterday in the wee hours to get to my grandma’s care home in the morning. What I found was devastating. My grandma, the woman who has cared for her daughters her whole life long, who accommodated both my brothers in her home when my mother couldn’t have cared less, who gave literally everything, is alone, left in an environment unfamiliar to her, a filthy, hot and horrible room, and she is slowly and painfully dying.

Holding her hand yesterday, I couldn’t help but wish she would have died there and then. I know that this is an awful thing to think, but at least she wouldn’t have been so alone. 96 years of sacrifice for nothing?

I am so angry and unbelievably sad that my mother and her sister have taken everything when there was something to take and now don’t give back. At all. I would love to move my grandma to a home in London, but then she wouldn’t understand a word of what’s going on around her.

What shall I do? What shall I do? What shall I do???