Escaping

by Henrietta Taylor

  Norman had been so well for nearly eight months that it didn’t seem possible for the situation to have turned quite so suddenly. I was living in a state of suspended disbelief. Surely this couldn’t mean that my darling was really going to die? It made me sick to think of our family’s future without him in it. But I couldn’t allow myself to think of anything except ways of helping him to overcome the disease.

  Our plans for a third child were now permanently cancelled. Our wonderful happy days of baby watching and tea drinking were locked away firmly in my heart. Even nowadays these memories are rarely taken out, because of the searing pain that accompanies them. Those simple, insignificant moments and actions were what had made me love Norman more and more over the five years of our marriage.

  How do you define love? What makes you attracted to one person more than another? What makes it last? I couldn’t answer those questions, but I knew I couldn’t envisage a future without him.

  At first, Norman’s ability to joke about the state of his body made my heart go out to him. But he was struggling with such gross discomfort and mental anguish that it was inevitable this humour wouldn’t last. After the stent was inserted I had listened intently to every word the nursing staff had to say about the side effects that could be caused by the heavy doses of medication in combination with his mounting fear. I understood that his verbal attacks were really directed towards the hopelessness of the situation, not towards me, but they were still difficult to live with. Both of us were consumed by pain and grief over our disappearing future. Suddenly here we were on a roller coaster that was bouncing us around like rag dolls.

  The fact that the medical staff were doing their utmost to keep Norman alive with external bile bags and medication gave us little solace. How do you battle an unknown enemy? When it comes to a cancer that is attacking the body systematically, it’s just a game of Russian roulette. There were two possible outcomes: he would die or he would live.

  At the same time, Norman’s family were reeling under intense emotions, as Norman’s father was in the last stages of Parkinson’s disease — it had been diagnosed very suddenly and he had only recently begun to exhibit any signs of decline. Would the deaths of both Norman Taylors occur within the next twelve months? The sheer bleakness of the situation weighed so heavily on us; a blanket of despondency and misery wrapped itself around every member and friend of the family. I felt like lashing out at everyone. The alternative medicine I was taking did nothing to make me feel calmer. I just wanted time to stand still.

  Meanwhile, I wasn’t coping with two little children and a sick husband in the same household, even with the nanny’s help. My sister often helped mind my babies at the weekend when the nanny wasn’t around, and it gave Norman and me a couple of days free from the added pressure of entertaining two children under three years old. The ferry ride from Palm Beach to Patonga took under half an hour, whereas by car you had to make a large loop, which could take anything up to two hours. Kate or Mark would drive twenty minutes to Patonga from their home at MacMasters Beach on the Central Coast and meet us at the wharf. It wasn’t unusual to see single parents and their children travelling back and forth on the ferry; marriage break-ups were a sign of the times. But bad news has a habit of travelling fast, and within a short time the regular commuters gave me space and silent encouragement and pity — to a certain point. No one ever offered to help me as I struggled from the car with a stroller laden with bags of disposable nappies, clothes, food and the nebuliser for their asthma, two children’s car seats strapped to my back and the baby and the three-year-old holding on to my skirt, trying to be brave for Mummy all the time. The three of us would sit there in glum silence all the way across. My world was falling apart, and even more tragically, they had never known anything else in their short lives. No wonder they jumped into the arms of my sister or her husband on reaching the jetty. ‘Goodbye, Mummy.’

  Norman was putting me under more and more pressure to send the children to Kate’s for an extended period so I could devote myself to full-time nursing. This thought drove me mad with despair. I didn’t want to be his full-time nurse. I needed the children to give me a focus to my day, safe in the knowledge that somehow we would all stagger along. These were the children we had been so desperate for a few short years ago! I hadn’t been there when Harry took his first steps, but I was determined not to miss out on any other milestones. For me it was wholly out of the question that the children would leave our home.

  Arguments flared when baby Harry built a tower with the packets of morphine that had been left lying beside Norman while he eased into his afternoon catatonic state. I just had to become more vigilant as we spiralled downwards. Norman’s medication was put into a box and kept high out of reach.

  But this episode only underlined another nagging worry. I strongly suspected that Norman was taking almost double the dose of morphine prescribed by the doctor.

  ‘Kate, what do I do?’ I asked my sister. ‘I’m buying so many of these morphine tablets. They’re not holding the pain — I’m starting to suspect it’s emotionally based.’

  She assured me that the amount Norman was taking would slow down a baby elephant. She told me she would come and see him and assess the situation.

  It turned out to be exactly as I had thought: the local doctor informed me he was popping the slow-release morphine tablets like lollies, which meant they were having little effect. The doctor suggested liquid morphine. Terminally ill patients needed support in whatever small way they could provide. The downside for Norman was that his reflexes became so slow he could no longer drive — though I breathed a secret sigh of relief at this news. I had long been concerned about Norman’s driving, but he had been adamant that his reflexes were as keen as ever, and felt like he was under house arrest when I prevented him from going out. At any rate, his damaged liver was now causing him to feel so ill that driving was no longer a priority.

  At first the small bottle of liquid morphine seemed to be the answer to our prayers. But it was polished off quickly and Norman went straight on to a one-litre bottle, from which he would swig, saying that he could measure twenty millilitres by the mouthful. Oh, my love! All the doubts I’d had when I discovered the packet of Serepax resurfaced. Norman was constantly criticising me for not giving up alcohol — yet he now seemed to have a massive morphine addiction. How could his system cope with so much; how had it become so desensitised?

  Standing at the counter of the pharmacy ordering yet another bottle of morphine, I felt eyes full of pity on my back. I wanted to call out: ‘I’ll take a ham and cheese pizza with that family-size bottle of morphine.’ But I never did. The rule was never to break down in public. Always nod in agreement with inane comments that advances were constantly made in cancer research. Maybe so — but it would be too late for us. Never admit that you desperately needed help. Our family was one of the lucky ones; at least we could afford hired help for the children. But what you really want is a big warm blanket of love to insulate you from the ravages of the emotional storm around you.

  So I turned a blind eye to Norman’s consumption of morphine — did it really matter if he became dependent on it at this stage of his life? We returned to a certain amount of normalcy — if sheets soaked in bile, urine splattered around the toilet, raging temperatures and a red itchy rash covering his body could be called normalcy. But then his father suddenly died on 16 June 1994. Norman had admired and adored this man who had overcome adversity to rise high above his humble beginnings. The deepest depression now occupied Norman’s every thought, and his words to me became increasingly bitter.

  His sister was particularly devastated. This was the man she had idolised all of her life. The clarion of death was trumpeting loudly all around the family: her mother had suddenly passed away not long ago; now her father had died too, and within months it looked like it would be her beloved brother’s turn.

  On the day of his father’s funeral, Norman asked me to dress in front of h
im. He wanted to see how I would present for a Norman Taylor funeral, as the next one would be his own. Standing before him in my underwear, seeing the hard, unfeeling look in his eyes, hot tears of shame and indignation streamed down my face. Was this what we had come to? Gone were the striptease days of laughs and giggles — were we only left with silent humiliation and recriminations?

  That evening I sat on the top step of our house and howled into the night. Norman had always called me his best friend, but now he looked at me as though I were the enemy; he either ignored me or sneered at me. His love for me was dying at the same rate as the cancer was taking over his body. In leaps and bounds.

  But there was worse to come. In August, just a few months later, he was once again diagnosed with liver failure; the tumour had grown rapidly and the stent was blocked. The doctors tried to explain the futility of the situation, but I wouldn’t have a bar of it. I begged the head doctor to reconsider Norman’s treatment, citing his previous excellent health record, his young age and young family who needed him. He relented and agreed to insert a second stent into Norman’s liver, knowing that this would only delay the inevitable.

  Norman and I struggled now to get through each day; some were good and some were very bad. There were so few things that gave him any pleasure. Food was no longer enjoyable. During the early months of his illness, after he had gone through the hideous chemotherapy treatment, we had managed to go to restaurants and have a few hours where the words ‘cancer’ and ‘doctors’ were prohibited. But now, in the second year of his illness, we were both close to breaking point. Everything he ate had to contain beetroot and other ingredients that cleansed the liver. He would bitterly complain that his soup was commercially bought; that I no longer cared enough about him and my prime concern was only ever the children. I knew it wasn’t really him speaking, and there was very little I could say in response.

  Night-time didn’t bring us any relief. I couldn’t control the night sweats, which were becoming so pronounced that once I woke with a start, thinking that I had urinated in the bed; I was bathed in sweat and bile from the external bag Norman needed. The rankness of decay and raw fear filled the room. The sheets were soaking — a vile yellow colour. Scrub those sheets! Scrub the disease from our lives! Nothing could ever be clean or white enough!

  No wonder I felt I needed to exercise some control over my own life. My intake of food was the only thing I had a say in — and it was going to stop. The disease could wage a war on Norman; I would wage a war on food. The emptiness in the pit of my stomach could never measure up to the size of the void in my heart. For days on end, I consumed water and little else. Although I desired it more than anything, I drank very little alcohol at this time, as I was on constant standby in case Norman suddenly needed medical assistance in the middle of the night for his excessively high temperatures and night sweats.

  ‘Take it day by day.’ Friends who had been Medical Sages just months before became overnight psychiatric specialists, but still spouted the same tired advice. It wasn’t a case of taking it day by day; the problem was dealing with the lack of food and the chronic lack of sleep from endless nights of suffering. I could no longer cry for him or for me. Grief was ravaging us both. He was slipping away from me and there was nothing I could do but watch over him and wait.

  The second stent gave Norman limited liver function by keeping some of the ducts clear, but all we gained was a few precious months — by the end of which I almost felt ready to embrace the inevitable with open arms. His system was shutting down little by little. I could no longer watch the constant suffering of this body emaciated beyond all recognition: the flaming red sores weeping from pressure points on his heels, his ghostly yellow eyes and those icy-cold hands. And our relationship had deteriorated to such a point that I wished with all my might that something would suck the life out of me at the same time. There was nothing left of our happy times, our wonderful life together, just sour memories of tears and rebukes that were not even us.

  Having read somewhere that people tend to die in the early hours of the morning, I would often sit by our bedside holding his hand, willing him either to come back to me for just one more hideous day, or to cross over to the other side knowing that he had not left our world alone.

  Almost two years after the first operation, Norman was hospitalised with total liver failure. I was told they were giving him a private room. When Norman had his first operation for the removal of the tumour from his lower colon, we both assumed that the private room went with the private doctor of our choice. It was meant to be a little luxury. But now I knew better. Private rooms were reserved for those who were about to die. Norman decided he didn’t want a private room after all.

  I was told that he might not survive more than seventy-two hours. I paced up and down the corridors, making even the nurses uncomfortable. I rang the family and friends.

  ‘Ring us when there is a change,’ they said. ‘We are here for you. Love you.’

  Everybody had been through too many standbys too many times. Many of our friends were attending a wedding and weren’t ready to rush to my aid until after the slap-up dinner. Was there no one to turn to?

  I let my fingers do the walking — they knew the number so well even after all these years — and hoped that my mouth would know what to say when the Latin Lover answered the phone.

  ‘I need to speak to you.’

  ‘I see. Well, that’s impossible. I have company here — and besides, I don’t need to speak to you. Go away and stay away. Whatever your problems are with your husband, you’re the one who married him. Sort them out yourself.’

  The words hung around my head like a cartoon bubble well after he had smashed down the receiver. How could he! I just wanted to speak, to empty my heart to anybody who was over the age of three. I’d even be prepared to hear about his boring job, that was how desperate I was for conversation. Anything, as long as it didn’t revolve around hospitals, cancer and dying. How could the man not pick up my signals? Why would the Latin Lover assume that I wanted a hot affair with him? I had grown up; obviously he still hadn’t.

  Miraculously, Norman pulled through and was released from hospital, though his condition remained critical. I thought things between us had already sunk as low as they could go — but he’d saved the cruellest blow till now.

  He announced that he wanted to go home to the Taylor family home at Palm Beach, to be with his sister. She was able to dedicate herself to his full-time nursing without the added stresses caused by small children. I caved in to his dying wishes. Very yellow and very unwell, he moved into the tranquil home of his sister and her husband, to enjoy what time he had left with the two of them. The children were more than welcome to be with their father, but his sister tried to tell me that perhaps my presence did more harm than good.

  Standing in the laundry with my face buried in his unwashed clothes, trying to catch the last bit of him before it went into the washing machine, my whisky sloshed into the sudsy water and tears of bitterness streamed down my face. Norman, the love of my life, had left our home. What had happened to the man I married who wanted to be with me every moment of the day? Never, ever had I felt so betrayed and rejected. Two years of suffering as I watched him slowly deteriorate couldn’t compare with the pain I felt at that moment.

  Finally, on 24 April, Norman’s sister rang to say that he was on oxygen and was barely breathing. The end was near. I got there just in time. As he slipped away, instead of crawling into bed with him and holding him in my arms, I stood alongside him, too scared even to touch him because we weren’t alone. He didn’t even seem to acknowledge my presence. I went home to throw up in the privacy of my own home while his lifeless body was taken away to the mortuary.

  I had organised my darling’s funeral months beforehand in one of my stronger moments, as I knew that when the time came I wouldn’t have the emotional strength needed for such a harrowing task. The flowers and music had been chosen. I had opted for the supe
rior coffin with optional fake metal handles (real metal would not disintegrate into ash during a cremation).

  And here we were returning to the same church where we had been married almost eight years before. Norman and I had talked about his funeral, and he had specifically requested that I wear the same black skirt suit that had been cleaned and hung in the wardrobe under plastic wrap after his father’s funeral. The children sat solemnly in the back seat of the car as they watched me throw up several times beside the road on the drive to the church at Manly. I had explained that their father was in heaven with the angels and would always be watching over us, but that the funeral was for the people who had not had the chance to say goodbye.

  The church was full of Norman’s students, friends and family, surprising faces from the past and people whose lives had been touched by our story. Even the Palm Beach ferry captain came to pay his respects.

  My darling had died on 24 April 1995, and I knew on that day that our lives had changed forever. I was nearly thirty-seven, Mimi was four, and Harry two and a half. Norman and I had been married nearly eight years — but there would be no more anniversaries to celebrate. He would only come back in our dreams.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Big Black Hole

  WITH NORMAN GONE,THE deepest, blackest hole opened up and I fell in headfirst. The washing would lie in the basket beside the clothesline waiting for me to remember to finish hanging it up; the pile of dishes in the sink grew high and so did the number of whisky bottles in the recycling bin. The flowers that had been sent by so many well-wishers gradually fell from their stems and died one by one, leaving the whole house thick with the smell of rotting stems in stagnant water. I couldn’t bring myself to throw anything away. How can life get back to normal when you can’t remember what normal is?