‘How do I look?’ he asked.
‘Dr Gorgeous,’ she replied.
Most evenings, he would ask one of us to help him to the cellar to pick a bottle of pinot gris. Gail loved the sweet white wine and Chris loved choosing it for her. It was a simple but thoughtful thing that he could still do.
There were some awful moments. Perhaps our worst night was when we forgot to turn off his electric blanket as we put him to bed. He awoke to find himself baking but was too paralysed to move. He called out to us repeatedly. We were just on the other side of the wall, but the television was turned up too loudly. When someone finally heard his weak cries, the bed was soaked and he was beside himself.
But there were beautiful moments too. Once I was helping Dad move from his wheelchair to an armchair. While he was still seated, he tried kicking something out of the way with his working leg, and somehow his whole body slipped in one quick movement so he was half hanging off the chair, his back parallel to the floor. I quickly wrapped my arms around his thighs to keep him from falling and as I hugged him and we ineffectively struggled to heave him up, we broke into laughter, which became more of a hindrance than his paralysis. We had to call Mum and James, who were more expert at the heavy-lifting duties than I was.
His spirit would always bounce back. ‘We will hold our heads high and not be defeated by this,’ he told Mum.
On Monday 1 June 2009, Dad and Mum enjoyed a beautiful night at the luxurious Katoomba resort Lilianfels, a gift from Adam, James and me for Mother’s Day. They ate high tea and admired the lovely rooms with toile wallpaper, accompanied by James and his girlfriend, Lulu, and their old dear friends Susie and Lawrie Hayden. Chris was very infirm by this stage and hugely reliant on James and Lawrie to transfer him from his wheelchair into the car or bed. On the drive home, he said to Gail, ‘I feel like I’m hanging from a thread; that you’re all hanging from the same thread. And that I should cut you free.’
Back at home, winter was setting in with grey skies and cold rain. Dad sat by the window in the sitting room.
‘Christie,’ Mum said. ‘We need to talk about your service.’
‘Yes, all right.’ Dad had turned his mind to his own funeral soon after first being diagnosed, but had capped the mental energy it required while he focused on living. Now, Gail sat with a pen and paper and jotted down some notes of eulogists, music and other details. Together, it was like they were planning another fundraising function. When they finished, he said, ‘It’s going to be good. I’d like to be there.’
He held the rosary beads that Kevin Rudd had given to him. He had taught Gail the comforting rhythm of the prayer with which he had grown up and through which he now found solace.
Hail Mary, full of grace,
The Lord is with thee,
Blessed art thou amongst women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus,
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us now,
And at the hour of our death.
Amen
My darling,
Your father’s was a very public dying. Chris, the inspirational surgeon’s surgeon, became the teacher of how to die with grace and dignity. I was simply a privileged observer. There was no pulling back from this.
I am humbled and motivated by the memory of his suffering.
Rendered incapacitated, paralysed and blinded at times as his health deteriorated, he continued unabated in his quest until his very last day. Not for himself, he had nothing to gain. His response to this grave adversity was honourable and inspirational. The image of him thwarted at every turn by his failing health was nothing short of sacramental.
He had been stripped of everything we continue to hold onto. The constraints of ego, the bondage of self-absorption, the politics of power and all that remained were the purest of motives.
Love, Mum
The End
It began with a sudden and most acute headache in the early afternoon of Wednesday 3 June 2009.
Appointments in the Order of Australia had been released to media ahead of the announcements on the Queen’s Birthday public holiday. Chris had been appointed an Officer of the Order and I had spent the morning fielding calls for interviews. From the moment he had woken up, Dad had been quiet. Mum made him scrambled eggs and he ate them slowly. Nursing staff came to change his wound dressing and he didn’t make his usual friendly quips. A journalist and a photographer from the Sydney Morning Herald came. I escorted them into the lounge room where Dad had spent so much time over the previous two and a half years. I kissed him goodbye and left for a seminar at university. Outside, the day was grey and overcast with a spattering of rain. Dark silver light filtered in through the window.
When he was alone again, sitting in his blue armchair and nursing a slight headache that did not seem particularly unusual, it is more than likely that the tumour ruptured a blood vessel and caused a bleed in his brain. He called to Gail softly, a sound as loud as he could muster. The pain inside his skull quickly became so excruciating that he could barely speak beyond a whisper. Gail heard him and ran in. The cerebral spinal fluid was leaking out of the hole in his head. She rang Dr Wheeler, who told her to bring him into the hospital for a scan.
‘Christie,’ Mum whispered as Chris held his head down with his eyes closed. ‘Helen said to come in for a scan.’
‘There’s no point,’ he said. ‘I’m dying. I need some morphine.’
She knew it too.
The plan had been for Dad to die at home. The previous day a bed had been delivered from Greenwich Hospital palliative care unit and set up in my bedroom. But in fact we were completely unprepared for him to die at home for one main reason — there was no morphine in the house.
Gail phoned the local medical centre and asked for Chris’s GP. The receptionist told her that he was having eye surgery, and Gail asked for somebody to come quickly.
She hung up and waited next to Chris. When nobody arrived she phoned again. But the doctor who was on duty said she had a waiting room full of patients, and could not get there.
‘Don’t let me die in pain,’ Chris said. And Gail knew she was letting him down. She had to get some morphine. She dialled Triple 0. The operator told her to ‘get the patient lying down’. Gail didn’t want instructions. She just wanted them to bring morphine. She was on the phone a few minutes later when the doorknocker slammed. Our dog barked. ‘Can you get that dog and put it in another room?’ asked the operator.
Two young paramedics stood on the doorstep.
‘Thank God. My husband needs morphine.’
‘We don’t have any morphine,’ they said. ‘We’ll need to call an ICU ambulance for that.’
Gail was on the verge of tears. One of the paramedics called for an ICU ambulance and ran up the driveway to wait for it. The other, a young woman, waited with Mum. Helpless, they crouched by Chris, who barely moved or acknowledged they were there. Finally a third paramedic arrived from the ICU ambulance. He said he had no intention of administering any morphine unless Gail said Chris was going to hospital. ‘But he wants to be at home!’ Gail said. ‘We’ve got the palliative equipment for him to die at home.’
They carried him to the hospital bed. But still the paramedic refused to administer the morphine unless Gail agreed to take him to hospital. When she did, he gave it to Chris immediately. As the morphine seeped into his veins and started to do its work, the skies opened up and it started to pour. Dad was bundled onto a stretcher and the straps were fastened around him. The ambulance sat at the top of our steep driveway and Mum and James held umbrellas over his body while the paramedics pushed him up the hill. The ambulance doors swung open and Chris was slid inside.
The cruel irony of it all, Gail thought. His own death such a mess, and after he has done so much.
‘Mum, can I go with Dad?’ James asked.
‘Okay, I’ll get his things and see you at the hospital.’
About ten minutes into the journey to the hospital, Dad looked up at J
ames and murmured, ‘Where’s Mum?’
‘She’s coming behind us,’ James said. He gave a tiny nod as he acknowledged the answer. Then he lost consciousness.
Adam and I were called and the family congregated in Gloucester House, where one of Dad’s colleagues led us into a small room. We sat in soft chairs and listened to oncologist Dr Lisa Horvath telling us there was nothing they could do. Mum stood up and walked out to Dad, who was lying asleep on a bed nearby. She held his hand and called in his right ear. ‘Christie!’ He opened his eyes, turned his head and looked at her. They locked eyes and he smiled at her for the last time.
He was moved to a room on level 10 of RPA that overlooked the University of Sydney campus. We kept vigil for the next thirty hours as his big, strong heart continued to pump life through his body. Extended family, friends and colleagues moved gently in and out. His breathing became laboured and at about four in the morning he suddenly sat bolt upright. ‘Dad!’ we said, hoping for a miracle yet. But his green eyes looked at us without recognition. He spewed vomit and we yelled to each other to roll him on his side. We squeezed his cheeks and tried to unclench his jaw as he groaned. And then he was gone again, into the depths of unconsciousness.
As Dad lay in that hospital bed, his body restless and sometimes letting out a long, deep groan, a powerful passage from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness echoed in my head:
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing under foot, without spectators, without glory, without the great desire for victory, without a fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own rights and even less in those of your adversary.
As the hours passed, his body eased into greater and greater gentleness. Mum tried to remove his wedding ring, but it hadn’t been removed for months and was now stuck so tightly over his swollen finger that it wouldn’t budge. A nurse brought in metal cutters and clamped down on the handles with all her force to break the ring free. My mother fingered the ring and put it in her pocket.
At about six in the evening, Kevin Rudd arrived, having flown to Sydney straight after parliament to be here. He gave each of us a big squeeze. ‘My God, you’ve been a brick,’ he said to Mum. Then he stood by Chris’s bedside, held his hand and read the citation for his Order of Australia. ‘Whereas with the approval of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Australia and Sovereign of the Order of Australia, I have been pleased to appoint you to be an Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia.’ Respecting the sanctity of the circumstance, he stayed just a few minutes more.
The last two hours of my father’s life were peaceful. His breathing became lighter and lighter. As it did, a dense white fog settled on inner Sydney. It curled through the streets and engulfed the football fields and sandstone buildings of the University of Sydney that I could see from the window of that hospital room.
Shallower and shallower, his breath became still. Was he still drawing air? It was hard to tell. I lay my head on the soft, white sheet next to his body and watched for the tiniest movement in his chest. There could be a miracle yet, I prayed. But then he didn’t breathe again. It was just after eight o’clock at night on Thursday 4 June. Outside the fog hovered close to the earth. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. There was no cataclysmic crash of thunder or howling from the skies. The world simply continued to spin. And we were left standing on it.
PART THREE
Till Death Do Us Part
Afterlife
We could not leave his body. We stayed and stroked his hair and rested our hands on his skin. We cut locks of his hair, and James took the hospital band from around his wrist. His muscles were still warm and soft. He looked peaceful and like himself. It was impossible to believe that life had simply lifted out of his body. His face became slightly more pale. The skin on his back turned a deep purple as the blood coagulated. After about an hour, Mum pulled Adam, James and me away, saying that we would be able to see Dad again before the funeral. We limped to the car, which floated home through the fog still engulfing the streets that we knew so well. At home, I went upstairs to Mum’s room and as I turned the corner, she slumped to the floor in tears. ‘Oh, Mum,’ I said, hugging her.
I woke the next morning at seven to the sounds of the television in the next room. Listening from my pillow, I heard the presenters of a breakfast television show talking about Dad. I turned my eyes from the ceiling to the bedside table. His glasses sat there. Nearby, the red cashmere jumper that he’d been wearing on his last morning at home hung over a chair. I put the jumper on and went out to the living room. My uncle Phil and aunt Carmel were staying with us, as they would for a few weeks. Phil, always the earliest riser, was standing by the gas fireplace, watching the TV.
‘Morning, Jet,’ he said. ‘How’d you sleep? Have a look at the paper.’ He motioned towards the kitchen. I walked over and picked up the Herald. A sad photo of Dad was on the front page. He looked puffy, disabled, wrecked. He made no pretences for the picture. It was taken two days earlier for the story about the Queen’s Birthday Honours. He wore the same jumper that I was wearing now. But he was just here, I thought. I couldn’t fathom that he wasn’t here now. His walking stick still leaned against the blue armchair where he had sat that morning. The book he had been reading still had its bookmark in place. How could he not exist any more?
On the TV, a news presenter animatedly talked about the irony of Chris dying from the same disease that he cured for many other people — a neat narrative, but not entirely accurate. (Chris operated on the soft tissues of the head and neck; not the brain.) As the morning talk about Dad continued, Phil turned to me, mystified. ‘When did this happen?’ I knew what he meant. When did Dad become so high profile? I turned my palms upwards. ‘I don’t know.’
I went back to bed and awoke later to the sounds of a full house buzzing from behind my door. The smell of flowers — oriental lilies, gardenias and roses — swept me up as I crept towards the study. There, I found Mum hanging up the phone. She looked well. Fresh from a few hours sleep and in organising mode, she was calm and measured.
‘Darling, the corneal transplant unit called,’ she said. ‘Dad elected to be a donor. They were calling for permission to transplant his cornea.’
‘Really?’
‘I told them yes. Is that all right?’
‘Of course.’
‘Also, Kevin Rudd telephoned. He asked if I’d accept a state funeral for Dad. Of course I said yes.’
‘Wow.’ I was taken aback. She didn’t appear to be.
It is a prerogative of the prime minister of the day to order a state funeral. My father’s was the only state funeral that Kevin Rudd ever ordered. As many people know, organising a funeral is a big deal under ordinary circumstances. You are essentially holding a large function with logistical peculiarities, which might be attended by everyone you know, and you have about a week to prepare. But agreeing to a state funeral introduced many issues we’d never considered. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet was now involved, as were the NSW government, state police, federal police and St Mary’s Cathedral, where the requiem mass would be held. There were questions of protocol, governmental requirements and discussions about who paid for what. There was the writing and approval of state funeral announcements, whether the national anthem would be sung and the Australian flag draped over the casket. Lifehouse material, ushers and seating arrangements in the cathedral had to be arranged. There was even, I later learned, a request for the micro-management of places in the pews for certain dignitaries who did not want to be seen by or sat next to one another.
All these issues were fielded and dealt with by Paul Cave. Paul was one of Dad’s former patients who had become a great friend and something of a mentor. A businessman and entrepreneur who founded Sydney’s BridgeClimb, Paul has been a director of the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse for years. He had been my father’s
confidant during long chats into the night at Paul’s offices near the southern pylon of the Harbour Bridge. I understand that they talked about Chris’s worries, his regrets, his triumphs — and Paul gave Chris assurances of being there for Gail after his death. Paul began to fulfil his word immediately, stepping in as the family representative in all matters relating to the state funeral.
A series of meetings were held at our home and a few days before the funeral was scheduled to take place, a meeting at St Mary’s cathedral house brought all the parties together. Adam and I chose to accompany Mum. I stepped out of the car, my shoulders so heavy I thought I might have to sit on the pavement. But then my big brother gave me one of his quintessential bear hugs. Adam was solid as a statue as we stood in the shadow of the cathedral, his thick, hairy arms wrapped around me.
Inside the cathedral house, tables had been arranged in a large circle and close to twenty people were already seated or standing nearby. Some of the faces I recognised and I was particularly thankful for the familiar face of Father Kevin, our parish priest and family friend who would conduct the service. Paul Cave gave us long, warm hugs, as did another dear friend of the family, Keith Cox, who would also play a large role in the planning of the service. A leading nurse and head of the oncology chemotherapy unit at RPA, Keith had brought whatever we needed to the home as Dad became more unwell. Now he would be the acolyte (or assistant) during the requiem mass, continuing to perform a guardian angel role for our family. Patsy Healy and John Harris, the gentle and kind representatives from W.N. Bull Funerals, were there. The assistant secretary of the ceremonial and hospitality branch of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet attended with two colleagues. There were also representatives from the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet, COMCAR, NSW Police, a communications firm and Lifehouse at RPA, as it was then known. Dev Gopalasamy from the performing arts department of Riverview was coordinating the music. Father Paul Hilder, the dean of St Mary’s Cathedral, and Mari Palomares, the event coordinator, were there.
This is Gail Page 11