This is Gail

by O'Brien, Gail

  Dedication

  For my brother James.

  More I love you and learn from you.

  Epigraph

  ‘Because, look, even the missing are there, the gone and taken are with them in the shade pools of the peppermints by the beautiful, the beautiful the river. And even now, one of the here is leaving.’

  — Tim Winton, Cloudstreet

  ‘“Don’t worry, darling. I’ll be all right,” I reassured her, a mountaineer tumbling into a bottomless crevasse and calling back with unfounded confidence to his lifelong climbing partner.’

  — Chris O’Brien, Never Say Die

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part One: A Prologue Young Gail Bamford

  Falling in Love

  Embarking Together

  Riding High

  Part Two: In Sickness and in Health Countdown

  Meeting Despair

  Brain Surgery

  Finding Hope

  To Choose Life

  Caring for Dr Gorgeous

  Shedding the Ego

  The Tumour, a Gift

  Witness to Grace

  The End

  Part Three: Till Death Do Us Part Afterlife

  A State Funeral

  Where is My Husband?

  Asking the Questions

  Christopher Adam

  Seizures

  While God is Marching On

  The Answer Lies Within

  Part Four: This is Gail The Main Event

  Guarding the Vision

  Lessons in Politics

  The Deep End

  Back to Physiotherapy

  The Ashes

  Pocket Rocket

  Photo Section

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  One night in 2013, about four years after my father died, my mother, grandmother and I were enjoying a meal of comfort food at a small table in Nana’s neat kitchen. Suddenly my mother started spluttering and dry retching. To my horror, she looked to be choking. I started to stand, preparing myself to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. But before I could help, Mum swiftly and nimbly reached her fingers down her own throat and extracted a mouthful that contained a potentially murderous chicken bone. Nana — a matter-of-fact woman in her mid-eighties who never endorses fuss — rolled her eyes and said in her gentle Irish brogue, ‘For goodness sake, Gail.’ Mum defended herself as having come close to death, left with no choice but to regurgitate onto the tablecloth her chicken and green beans.

  We started to giggle, partly at Nana’s reaction, and partly at Mum’s uncharacteristically abandoned table manners. How farcical it would have been, I said, if she had actually suffered an inglorious demise as the result of choking on a chicken bone at Nana’s kitchen table. Soon we had to hold our sides. My mother’s body was pitching back and forth with laughter. I paused and watched her for a moment. Her luminous smile seemed to fill the room. She was laughing so completely it was as if time stood still. I had thought we might never laugh so wholeheartedly again. Yet, here she was. Surely for my mother to laugh like that, after years of such sorrow and heartache, is a symptom of something magnificent inside.

  My mother cared for my father — her beloved husband — as he died. She helplessly tried to halt the progress of his brain tumour as if trying to stop an avalanche crashing down a mountain. As those treacherous cells clawed their way further into his beautiful brain, my strong robust father — himself a world-renowned cancer surgeon — became completely dependent on her. Her embrace of this role sent their love and marriage to divine heights.

  Caring for him was all-consuming, exhausting and dreadful in the truest sense of the word. Losing him was even worse.

  The night my father died on 4 June 2009, a thick fog covered the city. Standing by his bed with my mother behind me, I watched through the window of the hospital room as it rolled in, curling around the Sydney University spires towards us, an ominous mist coming to carry him away. After we arrived home, I walked into my parents’ bedroom. I found my mother sitting on the bedroom floor weeping and broken down, newly widowed, facing a life without him.

  Life went on but then it crumbled when, almost two years later, my elder brother failed to do the simplest of things: to breathe in his sleep. A brave and strong young man with a strapping physique, burly arms and big hands with knuckles like marbles, Christopher Adam O’Brien was a dutiful police officer and security guard and a gentle son, brother and partner. At the age of twenty-nine he suffered a fatal seizure while he was asleep. His death left us without the comforts of legacy, some kind of longevity or the chance to say goodbye.

  Through these personal tragedies, I grew to know my mother more fully. I began to recognise the tremendous spirit inside her. Beneath her tender demeanour, youthful smile and graceful touch lay a fortitude I had never realised was there.

  After twenty years focused on her family and her husband’s brilliant career, my mother, Gail, re-entered the workforce and returned to physiotherapy. She accepted a position on the board of the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, diving into the depths of politics and bureaucracy without any confidence in her ability to swim. She became an advocate in her own right for compassionate and holistic cancer care.

  I could attach many grand words and glorious themes to my mother’s story. I could describe it as an example of grace, resilience, transcendent dedication, renewal, or a search for the meaning of it all. But ultimately Gail’s is a story of love. This is the love story of a wife, of a mother, of a family.

  PART ONE

  A Prologue

  To my dear mother,

  The other night we sat in the car trying to decide which restaurant to choose — Thai or French. I called for a swift decider with sudden-death Scissors Paper Rock. We pumped our fists (‘SCI-ssors, PAY-per, ROCK’) and both landed on scissors. We replayed and produced clenched fists — two rocks. Then we each went for scissors again. And after the fourth attempt, at the sight of two palms stretched out into paper, I groaned and slapped my hand on my forehead while you giggled, seemingly with delight.

  Growing up, I was my father’s daughter. But in recent years, I think I’ve grown to become more like you. I want you to know that I appreciate that more and more.

  With love, Juliette

  Young Gail Bamford

  An obstetrician arrived at the nursing facility in Baggot Street, Dublin, on 26 July 1954, and started sprinting up the stairs before he tripped and tumbled all the way back down. On the top storey, Grace Bamford was in labour with her second child. She wasn’t fazed when told the doctor couldn’t tend to her because he was sprawled on the footpath with a broken leg. A practical and steely woman who had grown up in the tiny coastal Northern Ireland village of Portaferry, Grace had delivered her first child at the age of twenty-three in a makeshift maternity room in the home of a coalminer in Tweefontein, South Africa. In central Dublin and two years older, she had had nothing to worry about. Fortunately, a substitute doctor soon arrived. And moments later, so did the child — my mother. She was named ‘Gail’, meaning ‘father’s joy’.

  Grace’s husband, Murray, thought the story of his second child’s birth was hilarious and recounted it ever afterwards. As a general practitioner he delivered countless babies himself, from Dublin’s grand Rotunda Hospital to single-room homes in the city’s slums and remote mud-brick huts in Zululand, South Africa.

  Murray, a farm boy with an adventurous spirit, had been born in a majestic farmhouse named Lisnaroe just outside the town of Clones in county Monaghan — rural farmland in southern Ireland’s far north. The Irish border dissected the farm itself, causing no end of troubles fo
r the family, with IRA farmhands and King George’s police making demands. During World War I, when Protestant Northern Ireland endured rationing and Catholic southern Ireland enjoyed abundance, simply moving cattle from one paddock to another was akin to smuggling. But young Murray, whose family was Protestant, was perfectly content among the fields, orchards and lake until the age of nine when his older brothers unforgivably suggested that he be sent to school. He excelled despite the late start and went on to study medicine at Trinity College, Dublin where, at a local dance in Dublin city, he met Grace Burrows. She was an elegant and statuesque bank clerk with pale blue-green eyes, and Murray chauffeured her home on his bicycle crossbar.

  The pair married two years later on 8 September 1951, and over the next sixteen years Grace gave birth to six children in three continents. Adele was born in South Africa, where African neighbours were mesmerised by the little girl with white skin and red hair who spoke Afrikaans. Gail was born in Dublin, after which the family moved to England where Murray served as a doctor and officer in the Royal Air Force. Adrienne was born in Cheltenham, England and Murray (Jnr) at Roughton Base General Hospital in Wiltshire. Linda and Michael were born some years later after the family had immigrated to Sydney, Australia.

  Some of Gail’s earliest memories come from Lisnaroe, the farm where her father was born and that had been in the family for generations. She and her older sister, Adele, romped down the avenues, wandered through the fields and scrambled up haystacks. They delighted in secretly tasting ripe red tomatoes in the greenhouse and stealing peas from the neighbouring farm. They would shriek with fear at the sight of their neighbour, who would shout out, ‘Oye see ya, ya little Bamford girls!’ and playfully chase them away.

  As a child Gail Bamford had neat blonde hair, wide brown eyes and dreamy ways. By the time she started school, getting dressed in the morning was a ritual of getting no further than lifting the dress over her head. Before she had managed to slide her arms through the sleeves she would be distracted, usually by a book filled with pictures of ballerinas. Her mother, Grace, would find Gail bent over the bed wearing just her underpants and uniform draped about her neck. ‘Geel, get a move on!’

  Gail experienced surreal episodes where unremarkable happenings took on a cinematic feel as actors moved through their roles: cars rolled without speed; a woman bent down slowly and deliberately to a child; a man parked a truck with graceful precision. She would watch the scene with intense awareness and feel like a member of an audience before being snapped back into reality where the world found its pace and clamour again.

  ‘You’re going to be a dunce when you grow up,’ Adele told her little sister. With fiery red hair and long legs, Adele seemed smarter, could run faster and was generally better at everything, at least in her little sister’s eyes. But for Gail, the word ‘dunce’ conjured images of tutus and dance slippers. ‘That’s what I want to be! I want to be a dunce,’ she retorted.

  In 1959 with Cold War tensions high, Murray wanted to move his family as far away from Europe as he could. Their destination was determined by the responses he received from various medical associations: no reply from America; a bizarrely insulting one from Canada that implied Irishmen did not bathe every day; and a warm and encouraging letter from the Australian Medical Association. The decision was made.

  Australia was a land of sunshine and opportunity, luring people to its shores with subsidised fares. Murray’s and Grace’s tickets cost ten pounds and the children travelled free of charge. With four children aged eight, five, three and eighteen months, thirty-two-year-old Grace and thirty-four-year-old Murray left Europe for good.

  The journey at sea was five weeks aboard the Strathaird. A proud ocean liner that had carried the Australian cricket team nicknamed the Invincibles to England in 1948, the now sorry-looking ship was on her final voyage. In the Indian Ocean, the Strathaird broke down and drifted aimlessly for three days. To escape the suffocating heat of the cabin Murray took Gail and Adele up to the deck to sleep. With her hand in her father’s, Gail cast her eyes over the bodies of hundreds of other passengers who had the same idea. Shimmering in breathing and sighing lines, sleeping bodies were enveloped in a darkness that seemed eternal. It was at once comforting and foreboding to the five-year-old girl.

  As well as being dreamy, Gail was incurably honest. Grace took her two eldest daughters to the ship’s swimming pool, where the minimum age of entry was seven.

  ‘If anybody asks how old you are, just say “I’m seven”,’ Grace instructed.

  A woman approached Gail as she tentatively edged her way down the ladder into the pool. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.

  Gail felt her mother’s and Adele’s eyes on her as the woman repeated, ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Five,’ she whispered.

  Gail knew she had let her mother and sister down. They all had to leave the pool.

  The ship docked at Fremantle before proceeding around the Great Australian Bight. On the trip, huge storms lashed the Strathaird, which violently pitched from side to side. With so many passengers suffering seasickness the decks and halls were ghostly and silent. But Gail’s strong constitution was evident even then and she spent the days exploring the ship, dragging herself by thick ropes along the tilting corridors and across the deserted decks, squinting through the white ocean spray.

  The grand old Strathaird finally docked at Sydney’s Circular Quay on 1 July 1960. The Bamford family was collected by a driver and they headed for Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, where Murray Bamford had secured a job as a general practitioner. Promised sunshine and beaches, they arrived in a drab town in the middle of a chilly winter. Their new home was a dilapidated cottage where the rain leaked through the roof and they could see the snow outside through cracks in the weatherboard walls. ‘Don’t unpack. We’re going back,’ Grace announced as the tea chests were set on the ground. But they couldn’t afford to leave; it had cost twenty pounds to come to Australia but would be hundreds for them all to return.

  After six months in Blackheath, Murray’s desire to be beside the sea took the family to Mona Vale on Sydney’s northern beaches, then south to the Sutherland Shire, first in the suburb of Gymea and finally Cronulla — ‘God’s own country’, as the locals boast. Here they discovered the sunshine and beaches they had been promised, and Murray and Grace settled there to raise their growing family.

  Until she arrived in Australia my mother believed her name was ‘Geel’, as her parents pronounced it, not ‘Gail’. ‘Why do you talk like that?’ the other children at school would ask. Australia seemed an alien place and other children imitating her speech soon made her modify her pronunciation. Like her sisters and brother, Gail was well spoken, immaculately dressed and impeccably behaved. The Bamford children sat quiet as church mice on the verandahs of homes to which Grace, the doctor’s wife, was invited to pay a visit. Dressed in smart little kilts with matching blue-and-white blazers, they swung their legs in silence as they politely ate the horrible homemade ice cream to which they were treated.

  At Gymea public school Gail and Adele were part of a small cohort of students in classrooms tucked away in the bush. Gail loved being there. She played among the roots of the big trees, sweeping them out and inviting people in, pretending it was her own living room. She would accompany her father as he worked in the yard. ‘You’re closest to God in the garden,’ Murray would say.

  One day, back in the school’s main building, Gail sat in assembly with the rest of her classmates, watching while a fellow student performed a flashy dance routine, full of splits, twirls and leaps. The minute Gail arrived home she begged her parents to let her attend dance classes, and they agreed. Beverley Chatterton held children’s ballet classes in the local Presbyterian church hall. At the age of nine Gail was a late starter. But she displayed natural ability and acute physical intelligence, quickly becoming the star pupil who was awarded a scholarship every year.

  Gail’s parents decided to send her to Methodis
t Ladies College, a large private girls’ school in a western suburb of Sydney, for her secondary schooling. This entailed an interview with the headmistress, for which Gail wore a mustard-coloured suit with brown trim and brown gloves. As she and her mother walked across Burwood Park, Grace said, ‘Geel, when you are asked a question, you are not to say “I don’t mind,” do you hear?’

  The headmistress, Dr Whitley, seemed stern and important. ‘What are your interests?’ she asked Gail.

  ‘I like art. And I’d like to learn French or another language.’

  ‘Which would you prefer?’

  Gail paused.

  ‘Art or languages?’ Dr Whitley demanded.

  Gail gulped and whispered, ‘I don’t mind.’

  Perhaps Gail was inclined to be compliant or eager to please, yet she already showed signs of having a strong will. Her position in the A stream at school meant, to her disappointment, that she studied languages, science and maths but not cooking, sewing and art. Determinedly, she enrolled in first-level visual arts in her senior years, the only girl in her year to do so. Throughout high school she attended ballet classes nearly every night at the Hallidays academy, which meant catching the train into central Sydney. Almost every weeknight after dark she walked alone through the park adjacent to Central station and took the hour-long train trip home, arriving after 8pm — in time to eat dinner, do her homework and go to bed.

  At the age of fifteen Gail had to decide whether to become a professional dancer. Murray and Grace discouraged their daughter from following a theatrical career and spelled out the benefits of a university education. Deciding her parents were right, a year or two later Gail elected to study architecture at the University of Sydney. But thanks to a silly error when filling out the application form, she found she had been admitted to agriculture instead. Her father suggested that she’d be suited to physiotherapy, prompting visions in Gail’s mind of the British comedy show Doctor in the House in which young physiotherapists swanned around the hydrotherapy pool. She enrolled in physiotherapy at the NSW College of Paramedical Studies based at the University of Sydney.