Caring

Kieron looks after people: whenever I'm ill, Kieron always asks what he can do to help me to feel better, and that in itself does make me feel less ill.
When his sister had severe trigeminal nerve pain following a filling that was put into the nerve by an idiot of a dentist,Kieron was there for her. He sat on the chair in her bedroom and watched over her and tried to help her while I went out to get her oramorph from our local hospital. She was crying with the pain and still he sat there, totally unfazed by her howls and offered her love and smiles.
When my mum was completely incapacitated by Alzheimer's disease, he visited her in the residential home I had had to place her in and spoke to her as if she was 'normal'. He struggled to understand her illness, but it wasn't until I explained that it was as if her brain was like the hard drive on his Xbox and had crashed, that he was able to grasp the idea of the disease.
Even as a 3 year old, at my parents' home when my dad was still alive, he helped his grandad to carry shopping as he knew my dad had a withered leg and couldn't carry much due to his balance.
If Callum is unwell, Kieron always offers to stay home from school to look after him, although I'm fairly sure that there is an ulterior motive going on with this one.
My aunt, aged 83 at the time, had been to my house one sunday afternoon. As she and my cousin left, my aunt lost her balance on the pavement outside my house and fell, breaking her hip. Kieron to the rescue yet again, bringing out his duvet in his favourite shark cover, to wrap round her as she lay on the pavement waiting for an ambulance.
Illnesses are always punctuated by get well pictures placed near the sleeping invalids and even if I'm not ill, but having a sneaky afternoon nap on the settee, I usually wake up to find gentle hands covering me with a throw to keep me warm, followed by a soft kiss on the cheek or forehead. It's so hard to pretend to be asleep still so that Kieron can tiptoe out of the room, firmly believing that he hasn't disturbed me.
So when my daughter's boyfriend's grandfather was rushed into hospital yesterday, with just a few hours life expectancy left,I told Kieron that he was soon going to have someone else to look after. In my head popped Kieron's voice saying 'well he's sort of another grandad anyway as Mike's like my brother'. Only Kieron can see it quite like that.