‘We can’t say,’ the neurologist said. ‘It’s probably been there a long time. It could either be congenital or from birth trauma.’
Gail was floored. The doctors explained that if the fluid was to be removed, Adam would need neurosurgery and a shunt. The prospect of Adam undergoing neurosurgery was incredible to us. So soon after all of those brain operations on Chris, Gail could not entertain the thought of her eldest son enduring the same. In any event, we understood that surgery was not a guaranteed solution. The stress Ad had been under — physical, emotional and work-related — could have contributed. He was working late nights and early mornings. He might have been drinking too much alcohol. The decision was made to wait and see if he had another seizure. He did. Over the next few months, Jaya woke up to the same scenario twice more.
Without a murmur of complaint or an ounce of self-pity, Adam attended appointments at the neurosciences department at RPA, and underwent electroencephalogram (EEG) testing to look at the electrical activity of his brain. He had to wear electrodes attached to his scalp with bandages wrapped around his head. They hung like snakes down his body and connected to a compact portable EEG recorder. He took a week off work to do the tests, but was told to wear the things as he carried out his normal daytime activities and during sleep. There had been months between the seizures, and between times he had seemed perfectly fine. So we weren’t surprised when the test results, which didn’t see a fit, were inconclusive.
What happened after this was a mystery to us all. Despite Gail’s connections and knowledge of the medical system, it seemed as though we were falling through an enormous crack created by the inconclusive results. ‘So what happens now?’ they asked the neuroscience doctors. But there wasn’t any clear answer.
Adam was so patient and undemanding. He’d spent months having tests done. He’d worn bandages on his head for a week. He and Jaya had travelled to Bali and Japan where he stood by a well with healing smoke billowing softly from it at a temple, scooping the smoke over his head, asking the curative powers to work on him. He continued to spend time in the garden where Dad’s ashes were.
On 16 October, his twenty-ninth birthday, a strong windstorm engulfed Sydney, whipping up the Lane Cove River and bending the sprawling trees around our home. A single red helium balloon found its way across the rooftops and entwined its string around the azaleas surrounding the cross that stood above Chris’s ashes. I found it and took a photo for Adam, who treasured and saved the red balloon. He and our mother heard the same message: ‘Happy birthday, my darling son’.
Much more than James or me, Adam was interested in our mother’s spiritual explorations. He accompanied her to Bowral to listen to a retired maxillofacial surgeon, Dr Tony Emmett, give a lecture about different levels of the consciousness. Dr Emmett and his wife, Annie, invited Gail and Adam to their home for lunch, where Tony told them about a woman, Joan Moysten, a friend of his with whom he’d travelled overseas. He described her as the most gifted intuitive he’d ever met. She lived in Strathfield, Tony said, and he recommended that they see her.
Adam wanted to go and meet this woman. He had asked Mum to take him to Suzy, but she had avoided this, fearing that anything Suzy said would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Gail went to meet Joan on her own and their conversation was a philosophical one. At one point, Joan looked out the window and said ‘everything you see out there is an illusion’.
‘Well then, what is God?’ Gail asked.
Joan took a blank piece of paper. ‘See this? God is like this paper. And we are all playing out our lives on that.’
Even if Joan and Adam had nothing more than an interesting discussion, Gail thought Joan could be a good person for him to meet. They went to the Strathfield apartment block and sat in a bright corner of Joan’s sitting room together. Joan talked generally for a time and Adam asked her some questions. Then their talk took an unexpected turn. Joan predicted a male death in our family in April. Adam and Mum looked at each other. April was two months away. Joan deflected. ‘It could be a male animal.’ Both their minds turned to our dog, Mr Menzies, who was by then fifteen years old.
They came home. Ad said to me, ‘Hey, Jet, you’d better look after Mr Menzies okay because this woman said there’d be a male death in the family in April.’
‘I am looking after him, I’m his twenty-four-hour nurse. I don’t see you holding him up so he can take a piss.’
‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘I’m just telling you what she said.’
It was almost a year after Adam’s first seizure and Adam and Jaya would frequently stay overnight, sleeping in our spare bedroom. At two o’clock one morning, Jaya ran into Gail’s bedroom. ‘Addy’s fitting,’ she said.
Adam was not conscious and his breathing was laboured. He was suffering a serious grand mal seizure, with violent muscle contractions, as well as arching his back and clenching his teeth. It appeared to ease off and he tried to stand up. At first Jaya and Gail thought he was regaining consciousness, but he came close to falling and they had to pull him back down onto the bed. This happened again and again for forty minutes or more: his big, strong body heaving itself up and the two women attempting to hold him on the bed. They were talking to him, but he was unresponsive. He urinated. It took a long time for him to become lucid again.
The next morning he was groggy but insisted that he had to go to work. James drove him in, and on the journey, told his brother he loved him.
Gail called her father and described what she’d seen. ‘He needs to be on medication, Epilim or something,’ he said.
Gail called RPA neurosciences and made an urgent appointment with a doctor Adam had seen before. She insisted that he be put on medication. ‘Can’t he be in the sleep clinic and you can see what’s happening?’
‘You can put him there if you want to, but I don’t think that will show anything,’ said the doctor. Gail was dumbfounded by this response, which she interpreted as nonchalance, and made the appointment at the sleep clinic herself. However, on the day of the scheduled appointment Adam was rostered to work a shift, so he phoned the clinic and changed it to a week or so later.
One Sunday in mid-April, Adam attended mass with Mum, which was unusual. Gail was very worried about her eldest son, who seemed so lost without his father. After mass they sat in the sunshine and talked about his future.
The following Thursday, Ad slept the night at home. He went in to Mum’s room before six on the Friday morning — 29 April — to give her a kiss before work.
That day Gail looked at Mr Menzies. He was old and had Cushing’s disease, was going blind and was unable to walk more than a few staggered steps. But he was loved and fed and seemed happy enough. He certainly didn’t look as if he was about to drop dead the following day. ‘That woman was wrong,’ Gail said, bending down to scratch behind his ears.
While God is Marching On
On 30 April, a Saturday, Adam got out of bed early in the morning to wave Jaya off to work. They were then living with Jaya’s mother in the western Sydney suburb of Greystanes. Jaya was working at an aged-care facility and rostered on the morning shift that day. They walked out to the front verandah together, where he kissed her goodbye. He returned to bed, alone.
The red balloon that the wind had brought on his birthday hovered in the corner of the room. Still inflated a half year later, it levitated as our dear angelic Adam slept.
Across the city, at home, Mum had woken up that morning feeling depressed, which was unlike her. She was unmotivated to get dressed and sat on the bedroom floor talking to her sister on the phone, which she normally would have regarded as wasting time. Meanwhile Jaya worked, James ate breakfast and I slept.
You’d think that you’d feel something, intuit it, if your beloved was drawing his last breath. But we felt nothing. We were oblivious.
Outside that small Greystanes house, not a noise was heard, as in that bedroom, alone, asleep, Adam’s brain and body suffered a paroxysmal seizure and he c
rashed to the floor. The Epilim pills sat on the table beside his bed.
When Jaya arrived home in the early afternoon, she found him face down on the carpet. She rolled him over. She screamed his name in horror.
From his bedroom upstairs, James heard Mum’s phone ring in the downstairs foyer. Her voice answered, and raised in volume. ‘Give him mouth to mouth, give him mouth to mouth,’ he heard her say. James squeaked the handle of his door around, pulled it open and peered over the landing banister. Gail was hanging up. ‘James,’ she called loudly, before seeing he was close to her. ‘James, come with me, there’s something wrong with Adam.’ They ran to the car and scrambled in.
‘What’s wrong? What’s happening?’ James asked.
‘Adam’s turned blue and he’s on the floor.’
They were stopped at traffic lights a few minutes from home, when Mum’s phone rang again. Hooked into the car’s bluetooth, Jaya’s voice came across the car’s speakers. ‘The ambulance is here,’ Jaya wept. ‘Gail, Adam’s deceased. He’s died.’
James felt a physical sensation in his stomach, like he’d been kicked and winded. Mum stared straight ahead. Neither of them said anything. The seconds in this new world ticked by. The traffic light changed to green and cars in front moved forward. Gail automatically put her foot to the accelerator. ‘We’re on our way, Jaya. We’ll be there shortly.’ She pushed the red telephone symbol on the car’s display to hang up. ‘This can’t be right.’ They were silent for a moment, suspended in disbelief. ‘Jaya can’t be right.’
Past the Olympic site and onto the M4, Gail made her way westward to Greystanes. They arrived at a house cordoned off by police tape. A police officer said something about treating it as a crime scene. James ran in ahead and found his brother on the floor. Adam’s face was blue from the blood that had pooled there. There was no mistaking that he was dead. James ran out of the bedroom. ‘You can’t go in there, Mum.’
Her eyes wide, Mum pushed past him. At the bedroom doorway she saw Adam. In that moment, she was stripped of everything. Who she was and all she had fell away at the sight of her son’s lifeless body. Through the home stung the sound of our mother’s scream.
‘Mum, stop, stop!’ James held out his arms. She hit her younger son’s hand away and broke down by her older son’s body. Her big, strong, angelic boy. Up she hauled her body and moved into the living room. She crouched down by a couch and sat on the floor.
James took her phone and started making calls. I didn’t answer. James dialled Gareth instead, whose normally soft voice became harsh. ‘What?’ he asked in disbelief. Then James phoned Gail’s sister Linda, Carmel, Mike O’Brien. He sat on the kerb outside the house and called his best friend, Will, and girlfriend, Lulu.
Back in Hunters Hill, I was up and dressed and had decided to take Mr Menzies for a walk. We had paused by a wall while Mr Menzies investigated its evidently wonderful scents. I smiled as I saw Gareth’s car pull up. He got out and walked toward me, and his familiar face seemed changed. He told me Adam was dead. The ground rose up to meet my knees. Gareth picked up the dog and helped me get into the car. I lay down in the front seat as Gareth drove.
We arrived to find James and Mum with Jaya and Jaya’s mother out the front. ‘It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay,’ I garbled as the three of us clasped each other. Linda, Carmel and Phil arrived. We waited outside the home as paramedics and police cleared the scene. A long white van pulled into the driveway.
Inside the bedroom, Adam was loaded onto a stretcher. The blood in his face had dispersed and he looked like our beautiful boy again. He could have been asleep. James was by his body, and Mum went to cut locks of his hair. She turned and held out her hand to me. ‘Come on, sweetie.’ But I couldn’t move beyond the bridge of the door. I turned for the street and bent into the gutter, vomiting. When I looked up again, Adam had been packed into the van, which was pulling out of the driveway. It glided down the street, carrying him into the darkness.
At home, Gail sat in Chris’s blue armchair as four nieces — her brother Murray’s daughters — silently surrounded her. They were like angels with their big, sad eyes in beautiful faces and their soft touches. They did not speak, they simply encircled her, offering their compassion and strength with their silent presence. They’d done the same for me, when they’d found me sitting alone at Dad’s wake.
Gail steeled herself. We just need to get through this. James stayed with her that night. It was the worst night she had endured. James couldn’t sleep. He kept seeing the ghastly image of his brother’s body. He got up and went to the bathroom. He staggered back, pawing his arms through the air, saying Adam’s name. ‘Ad, Ad,’ he moaned, grasping at the invisible. Gail pulled him to bed. She had to help him sleep. She put on a meditation tape and stroked his back with her fingers. Up and down, with long, soothing strokes, the way he loved when he was a baby. Her arm ached as she held on and on through the night. Downstairs, I sat by Jaya on the couch, as she wailed for her Addy.
The next day passed but Gail did not make any calls. She did not tell anyone what had happened: the news would spread on its own. She and James sat in the morgue, as the coroner would have to determine the cause of death before Adam’s body could be taken to a funeral parlour.
The morgue, in an old building in Camperdown, is less austere than one might expect. The kind staff led James and Gail into a small sitting room with comfortable chairs. Two closed doors adjoined the room and Adam was behind one of those. When they went in, he was wearing white and lying on a hard, silver bench. He was pale but looked perfect. There were his closed eyes, his soft lips, his button nose, his blond eyebrows, his rough stubble, his strong arms and knuckly hands. They kissed him, lay their heads on him. They would see him again, when they brought me and the rest of the family.
We learned that the cause of death might have been something called sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Not much seems to be known about it, despite it being the leading cause of death in young adults with uncontrolled seizures. About one hundred and fifty young people die from SUDEP in Australia each year. An autopsy might have told us why Adam stopped breathing, but Gail refused to allow it. ‘It’s not going to bring him back,’ she told me. ‘What happened in that room? He had a massive, massive fit. His death was the consequence of that. We don’t need to know if he stopped breathing because of this or that reason. I won’t do it just to satisfy curiosity.’
Mum lay on the couch in the living room. The windows onto the garden were hidden behind heavy curtains. I’d never seen them drawn before. Sharp sunlight crept through the cracks. She opened her eyes as I entered. She bent her knees upwards to make room as I perched on the edge of the couch. She rested her wrists across her forehead. I leaned forward and placed my head in my hands. She stared up at the ceiling. I stared down at the floor. We were all arms, knees and silence. We did not speak. It turned out Mum couldn’t. She’d lost her voice.
Here we were again. The four of us in the same little chapel at W.N. Bull Funerals. ‘Death stalks tragic family’ was the Daily Telegraph headline. The King Street traffic roared by outside and the raw sun streamed through the window. ‘How dazzlingly the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery,’ wrote Mark Twain after his daughter Jean died after an epileptic seizure in the bath.
Adam lay where Dad had been not two years before. He was dressed in his big security boots and pants. He wore one of his favourite T-shirts.
Here we were once more, surrounded by the friends and relatives who had buoyed us after losing Dad, making plans for the service. Eulogies, hymns, readings, prayers of the faithful, reflection music, photographs. We chose a memorial card that had an illustration of a young, fair man being embraced by an older one with dark features and hair.
Gail’s voice had all but disappeared. On the day of the funeral she still couldn’t speak. It seemed her emotional body had manifested a dramatic physical reaction with laryngitis that came out of nowhere.
His funeral took place on a Monday, nine days after his death. The same black cars, the same kind drivers from W.N. Bull. Hundreds of people crammed into our parish church Villa Maria to celebrate the life of a gentle, humble man. Though Adam had no longer been a police officer at the time of his death, former colleagues from Newtown LAC attended in uniform and formed a guard of honour. Police, security guards, school friends, doctors, businessmen, socialites, all came and cried for him.
Junior, Adam’s close friend, had said: ‘Mrs O’Brien, tell me it isn’t true,’ on the phone after he’d heard the news. Now he bent his huge body over the coffin and kissed it. He turned and looked down the aisle, staring beyond the doors of the church. His little boy bumped a tall candlestick, sending it falling towards the crowd. I heard gasps from behind me and cries of, ‘Look out!’ Junior extended his hand and caught the candlestick, not turning his head or changing his solemn expression.
Adam’s closest friends wore the bright colourful T-shirts he had loved so much. They lifted the coffin onto their shoulders and carried him out — the grand rhythm of the ‘Battle Hymn’ ringing in our ears.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
It was cold comfort to think that Adam probably wouldn’t have known he was about to die. Part of me wished he had died in battle or working, fighting a bear or jumping over the side of a cruise ship to save someone. His death might have been of the kind that is glorified and declared honourable. A good death. It would have been worthy of a man so committed to protection and service. He wouldn’t even have flinched at this. Instead, he was robbed. He fell asleep at the age of twenty-nine and never woke up. What demented plan could this be a part of? I asked myself as his coffin was loaded into the hearse. But I knew there was no plan. This was the cruel, random universe operating in all its grand indifference.
This is Gail Page 16