I accompanied Mum to the conference in Auckland, New Zealand. I could see that it was a daunting exercise for her as she prepared a half-hour speech with audio-visual materials and practised it with me again and again. At the hotel, Gail took the lift down to the large auditorium to meet with the conference organisers and discuss her AV materials with the technical crew.
The conference MC, who was young and excessively confident, introduced himself. Making polite conversation while waiting for the sound check, Gail asked him how he came to do this gig. ‘I’m a world champion public speaker,’ he replied, quite seriously.
At the conference’s plenary session I sat at the back of the dimmed auditorium to watch my mother talking to dozens of financial advisers. She wore a light-coloured dress that seemed to glow in the stage lights. Her talk included a video presentation that explained who Dad was. It showed his state funeral and included praise from Kevin Rudd and Charlie Teo. After that, there was an excerpt of a radio interview Chris had done on the ABC. As the video and audio played, Gail sat on a seat on the stage. I looked at her, neat and composed: she looked so small and lonely. But she did not feel alone. As Dad’s face shone over her and his voice filled the room, she felt a cloak of protection around her.
The following night we lumbered into the conference’s hired coaches and made small talk with attendees on our way to the conference dinner. On the third day, I knew Mum was relieved to have it all over and was looking forward to going home. It had been a depleting experience with a long lead-up period of preparation. At the conference’s concluding session the world champion public speaker, a little less brash than he had been at first, presented her with a gift. Back in the hotel room she opened the small red box and pulled out a tiny glass kiwi. ‘Now that’s going straight to the Cupboard of Awesomeness,’ I said.
The invitations to speak kept coming in. They were from schools, corporate events, fundraisers, retirement villages and countless Probus clubs. My mother forced herself to do these speeches, accepting every invitation possible. Chris had continued to accept these calls and appear at events until literally days before he died. It was clear that with his departure a gap had been created. My mother accepted the call for her to fill that gap — not to fulfil her own personal ambitions or drive, but to honour my father, to keep him alive.
At the same time she was finding her own voice. She was growing more comfortable with this role. She was embracing it. Her voice was gaining strength — literally — as she became more used to speaking to large groups. One evening, as I cooked dinner and she jotted down dot points for a speech the next day (for she no longer needed to write every speech out entirely), she made a remark partly to me, partly to herself, ‘It’s amazing how you develop at any age.’ Life had taken a most feared and dreaded turn. But already, from the ashes, something new in my mother was rising.
Guarding the Vision
Heaven help those who take this on after Chris dies, Gail used to think as she observed the plans for Lifehouse taking shape in the final months of her husband’s life. The task was enormous, and as colleagues came to see Chris, increasingly frail, in our home, it was as if he was about to take a long journey, and people were seeking as much as they could from him before he left.
My mother had not considered that she might be one of the people who would take on this responsibility. But about a month after Chris’s funeral Bill Conley, the lawyer who had been at that first Sydney Head and Neck Cancer Institute meeting and who was now on the Lifehouse board, visited our home. He told Gail that the board had suggested that she should be invited to join. A few months later, the invitation arrived in a phone call from the chairman, Sam Chisholm.
Gail had met Sam Chisholm and his wife, Sue, on only a couple of occasions. The television businessman had the reputation of being a ruthless chief executive and managing director who had steered Kerry Packer’s Nine Network and Murdoch’s British Sky Broadcasting to media dominance with plenty of sackings along the way. Chris, a master at spotting an opportunity to make a useful ally, had approached Sam through Channel 9 contacts and persuaded him to be chairman. Sam had given Chris advice on the people who should make up the board.
On the phone, Sam was curt but genial. As well as inviting Gail onto the board he talked about the project’s progress and hold-ups. ‘I’m just going to get the building built,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m about.’
The following month, Gail attended her first board meeting in the sleek modern offices of the Deloitte consultancy firm. She had driven Chris there many times, negotiating the traffic-choked Victoria Road, illegally pulling up outside the building in the middle of Sydney’s CBD to help her husband, who was unstable on his feet, out of the car.
On the first day that Gail was to attend the Deloitte offices for a board meeting without Chris, she took a very early ferry to make sure she was there on time. She knew all the board members personally but only a few of them well. The seventeen-strong board had only two women besides Gail, and two directors who were medically trained. They were an impressive group: intelligent, professionally successful and prominent in their fields. Chris had handpicked these people as a pack mainly made up of heavy-hitting business and corporate animals who could drive the project forward. It would have been easy to feel intimidated. When she arrived, Guillaume Brahimi embraced her in a big hug, as did Paul Cave and Bill Conley. Everyone was warm and welcoming. She listened to the proceedings without contributing much. She didn’t know what she could offer, but felt grateful to be there.
A few weeks later, Paul Cave and his wife, Carol, invited Gail to spend a weekend at their farmhouse in Berrima. It was one of the first trips she had taken without Chris. Driving the distance on her own and sleeping alone in a foreign bed might sound like unexceptional demands, but the most profound feelings of loss often lay in the everyday things. Gail drew comfort from Paul and Carol’s tender friendship. She sat at their large wooden table on the sunny Sunday morning, drinking coffee and admiring the picture-perfect scene of black-and-white spotted cows in the distance and cumulus clouds in the sky.
The conversation turned to Lifehouse. Paul was genuinely enthusiastic in his praise of Gail’s decision to join the board. He went on, however, to tell her he was concerned that, without Chris, there was a lack of clarity in certain aspects of the project. ‘There is no vision statement,’ he said. What on earth is that? Gail thought. She sensed that Paul had higher expectations of her than she had of herself. He seemed to believe that she could have an impact and could help to bring the vision to life. What can I do about it? she wondered. Isn’t everyone else an expert?
As she drove home, the conversation preyed on her mind. She remembered Chris’s words: ‘I just don’t want my name on a lemon.’ She had given her permission for this centre to bear his name. Now she realised that the name brought a duty. There was a risk that the thing might not live up to the man. The responsibility fell to her to ensure that the name and the vision went together. It fell to Gail to be Chris’s voice.
Gail enlisted the help of her youngest sister, Linda, a former marketing executive and now in management with the Westfield corporation. The first thing Linda did was interview Gail, encouraging her to find order and reason in what Gail knew. I do not think my mother had realised the value of her own experience and knowledge of the project before this moment. She was not a professor or doctor, an administrator or health bureaucrat. She was Chris’s wife, his carer, a highly intelligent, intuitive woman, manager of a busy surgical practice, cancer fundraiser and physiotherapist albeit non-practising for several years. She understood the complex issues of care and healing that Lifehouse was intended to address.
More than that, she had lived these issues. Our own experiences of a fragmented system of cancer care had seen us travelling from hospital to hospital for consultations with different doctors, multiple operations, blood tests, scans and chemotherapy. Mum would be fighting the traffic, searching and paying for parking, trying to ma
nage Dad’s nausea and headaches. She was always having to keep track of his illness and its history. She kept her own files. She and Dad were their own advocates. Nothing was easy. The chemotherapy agent had cost a fortune. The night following his third operation as she had closed the door to his room, she had felt so alone. All these things meant that she inherently knew the vision. ‘The key is translating that to others,’ Linda told her. Gail and Linda covered the dining-room walls with butcher’s paper, onto which they wrote everything Gail knew. They used notes and emails on Chris’s computer to trigger her memory.
‘I need to speak with Andrew O’Connell,’ Gail said as she came across emails between him and Chris. Andrew O’Connell is an Irish architect and creative talent who moved next door to us with his family soon after Chris’s diagnosis. Chris and Andrew had many conversations about the Lifehouse building, which Chris had said many times should be more beautiful than clinical.
Andrew had recently travelled the world with senior university professors in a dedicated fact-finding trip to inspect top-tier universities and biomedical research facilities in the USA, UK and Australia. He had told Chris about his findings of the world’s leading biomedical research facilities co-located on campus with the faculty of life sciences and close to large teaching hospitals. The key was the quality of the buildings, as Andrew explained, which encouraged the sharing of knowledge and facilities to drive successful research outcomes. These were not corporate or clinical buildings with fluorescent lights and cement walls. ‘Buildings like that are more likely to make a person sick,’ Andrew said. Rather, they were full of air and light, connected to the landscape, with warm colours. They were organised so that people would interact. Andrew demonstrated that there was a direct correlation between the quality of the facility and the outcomes produced from within it.
As Chris’s health had deteriorated, he’d asked Andrew to meet with the recently appointed Lifehouse chief executive, Tim Dugan. Dad had known his time was running out. But when Gail saw Andrew, he explained to her that he had not been able to do this. ‘I felt like I was letting Chris down,’ he told her. ‘But I didn’t want to tell him I didn’t have a forum,’ meaning the opportunity to put this forward and be formally included.
Andrew looked at the current plans of the building and pointed to siloed spaces with individual clinics. ‘Y’see, these don’t encourage sharing and collaboration. It’s all too sterile, too many white coats and orange signs screaming out “Clinic. Clinic. Clinic”. It looks like a car showroom.’ He pointed out the corporate colours, navy blue and orange. ‘These aren’t right. They’re not conducive to a sense of wellbeing, healing, calm, peace.’
The final board meeting for the year was approaching and time was of the essence. The architects awarded tender would soon be announced and Gail was desperate for the built environment to represent the vision. If not, she believed Lifehouse was at risk of looking like a hospital not much different from any other.
With Linda and Andrew she collated a document that articulated the pillars of what Lifehouse should be. Andrew added images acquired from his trip that gave a sense of warmth, gentleness, safety. In the end they had on paper a hospital that would treat human beings, not just patients, where a holistic approach would help people feel at peace and full of hope. Private spaces for reflection and contemplation would be balanced with collaborative spaces for doctors and researchers. It would have a sense of place, be an inner sanctum enhanced by the quality of light, texture, natural materials, water, non-clinical spaces, zen garden spaces and feng shui. ‘Imagine if Chris had been treated in a place like this,’ Gail said. This place would be a testament to Chris’s life and his work. But more than that — it would honour his suffering. It would harness the insights he discovered before he died.
Lessons in Politics
There was no time to waste: Gail felt that she needed to present the vision at the next board meeting to ensure the architects would be properly briefed. Linda suggested that she speak to Professor Michael Boyer, the director of the Sydney Cancer Centre and now Lifehouse, to enlist his support. ‘You need to get his buy-in,’ she said. This concept was a new one to Gail. The learning curve was steep as she absorbed the political strategising involved in board membership. Michael was very supportive and agreed that articulating the vision would be beneficial. He made many of his own contributions.
Gail had telephoned Sam on several occasions to discuss what she was putting together. He was guarded, but acquiescent. The night before the board meeting, Gail told him that she wanted Linda to present it and asked for permission for her sister to attend.
‘I don’t know what you want to do this for,’ Sam said. ‘Everyone knows what the vision is.’
‘How do you see the vision, Sam?’
‘It’s a comprehensive cancer centre,’ he snapped.
‘And what do you understand that to mean?’
There was a pause.
‘Sam,’ Gail said, ‘I felt concerned when you said to me, “I’m just going to get the building built.” That doesn’t instil much confidence that you understand the vision.’
Sam started shouting at Gail down the phone. Shocked, she pulled the receiver away from her ear. I went to the study door and could hear him from where I stood. Mum turned around to look at me. Her eyes were wide. She pressed the speakerphone button, which sounded a click, and made his voice echo through the small, hard-surfaced room.
He stopped. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes, I’m here, Sam.’
‘Have you got me on speaker?’
‘Yes, I have, Sam.’
Silence.
He calmed down and started to explain that sometimes he has a headmaster approach and gets the cane out. Gail’s voice was steady. ‘Just don’t use the cane on me, Sam.’
The following morning, Gail met Linda outside the Deloitte offices and together they entered a particularly well attended board meeting with project managers, Lifehouse executives and others present with the board. When the agenda item came up, Gail introduced Linda with her CV, and explained that her sister would articulate the vision for Lifehouse. As Linda talked through the presentation, Gail observed the full room. She felt a surge of energy as she saw people becoming animated and excited. When Linda had finished speaking the project managers asked her for a copy of her presentation. Gail was ecstatic but also relieved. She felt that she had brought some clarity to the vision and could now leave it to those who knew best, trusting the people in that room to bring it to life.
‘Does anyone have any questions?’ Linda asked.
‘Well,’ said a voice from the other end of the table, ‘I think that what this presentation has confirmed is that we’re on the right track already.’
This was Gail’s first inkling that she had trodden on some influential toes, that she had apparently invaded other people’s territory.
Over the coming days and weeks she would repeatedly find herself faced with resistance from some members of the board and executive. During a holiday in Port Macquarie, her parents and sister Adele looked on incredulously as Gail struggled to get a word in during a telephone conversation in which someone remonstrated with her over the work she had done. My mother hates to talk on mobile phones at length because their link to brain cancer has not been ruled out, but she allowed the phone to get hot against her ear as she stood her ground.
I had never thought of my mother as someone who dealt with confrontation by meeting it head on. In fact, I don’t think I had ever really seen her enter into a dispute before; Dad was usually the one who handled any dust-ups.
At first, I could see that she was uncomfortable with the situation. She would steel herself for phone calls, emails and meetings and take ages to recover from them, debriefing and replaying them over and over in her mind. But despite the emotional toll these confrontations took, she didn’t back down.
She raised the issue of the logo, which had been changed after Chris died without any referral to
her. It said in big bold letters, ‘Lifehouse at RPA’ and in small print underneath, ‘the Chris O’Brien Cancer Centre’ had replaced what previously said ‘the new Sydney Cancer Centre’. ‘The prime minister of Australia asked for my permission to name it The Chris O’Brien Cancer Centre,’ she said to me again and again. ‘Yet someone else has decided to turn his name into a tagline.’ When Gail questioned it, she was flatly told, ‘The logo is non-negotiable.’ Later, a marketing executive would argue that the rationale was there would be more Lifehouse centres around Australia, carrying the names of other luminaries. Gail was furious. ‘I’m not a marketing expert, but I would have thought that Chris O’Brien is the more powerful brand here, not Lifehouse,’ Gail said to the woman.
There seemed to be a serious discrepancy between the sentiments Gail saw and heard in the community and those of the people entrusted to make Lifehouse a reality. At ground level, most people Gail spoke to seemed to know and love Chris. Some people even referred to Lifehouse as the ‘Chris centre’, and at speaking engagements she was regularly (and frustratingly) introduced as being from ‘Lighthouse’. Meanwhile, the professionals at the nub of the organisation seemed blind to the value of Chris’s name or Gail’s contribution.
The months ticked by as Gail continued to fight for Chris’s name and vision to be accepted as centrepieces rather than optional extras. This caused a great deal of tension between her and the executive team. In March 2010, she was sent an email essentially warning her not to step out of line. She was so enraged by this that she had to get out of bed and go for a walk at 1am. The next morning, she phoned Brian McCaughan, the colleague and good friend of Chris’s who had told him that ‘patients decide how long they will live’. A leading cardiothoracic surgeon and RPA man, Brian knew all about Lifehouse and had had many conversations with Chris about it. His advice to Gail was clear: ‘If it were me, and I’m not telling you what to do, I would say that the situation is unacceptable and I’m considering my position on the board.’ Gail took his advice, replying to everyone on the original email. Sam Chisholm quickly telephoned saying, ‘I don’t like to leave things swinging in the breeze.’ He told her he wanted a meeting to discuss the vision and branding, and asked: ‘Would “The Chris O’Brien Lifehouse at RPA” be acceptable to you?’ Gail was satisfied (although later ‘at RPA’ was removed as the direct relationship between the two institutions changed). The meeting drew up a new branding style guide that was in line with the presentation Gail had produced. At the end, somebody stood up and said, ‘I think you’ve been very brave, Gail.’ Gail hadn’t considered her actions to be brave. Why should she have to be brave to do what she had done? But the important thing was: mission accomplished.
This is Gail Page 18