Max Moore Wilton was regarded as the toughest in the business world and Gail had felt quite intimidated by him in her first few months on the board. But as time went on, she came to know him as the most generous and reverent ally. In meetings, he would turn to her whenever he’d refer to ‘Chris O’Brien’. He had tears in his eyes when he and his wife, Jan, approached our car at Adam’s funeral and Jan reached through the window to hold my cheeks, saying, ‘You poor little thing, you poor little thing.’ Again Gail saw Max’s emotions as he made a large donation on behalf of his wife and himself.
Gail had seen that Robin Crawford, a founding director of Macquarie Bank, had the potential to cut people down quickly with his sharp tongue. At times, she would wait with trepidation for his response. But she came to know a person with a great capacity for humility. As the previous chairman when Chris was still alive, Robin would come to our home to meet with him and whisper to us, ‘I’ve come for my boxing around the ears.’
When Sam Chisholm resigned as chairman in 2012, he let his tough facade down entirely. ‘You’re an incredible woman, Gail. You’ve had to put up with all this rubbish from people,’ he said. ‘And with Chris and your son . . .’
‘Sam,’ Gail said, ‘that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me!’
‘Well, don’t tell anyone.’
Sweetie,
As I read back over all of this, I’m amazed that I had the gall to do all this, that I was so driven for the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse to succeed. Some people must have really wondered about this woman arriving at their offices, asking for their support.
I was so nervous when I went to see Nathan Rees very early on. My gosh, I’ve come such a long way since then. Rarely am I nervous now.
Plenty of people ignored me! But I don’t even care about that any more. That’s their way of saying no.
I am grateful for the passion, for I never would have had the motivation or the courage to do the things I have done, meet the people I have met, had the arguments that were necessary.
I have learned through all of this that I cannot force anything. I was just trying so hard, trying to force it to happen. Now I know that anything I try to force doesn’t work. I have learned to trust. Trust is all about allowing life to bring you what it’s meant to.
I have a contemplative practice every morning and evening. It is as routine as brushing my teeth. The most important part of this practice is gratitude and surrendering the day to spirit.
Sometimes I go down a track thinking it’s for one reason, only to find out it’s for another. Inevitably a connection made earlier comes around again in a different way, not what I expected. Again not in my control. If I don’t act on it, the universe sends it again and again. We call these coincidences. I am wiser now. They are not coincidence.
Love, Mum
Back to Physiotherapy
In April 2012, almost three years after my father’s death, my mother dreamed that she and he were sailing in the ocean and the boat began to sink. She kept diving down trying to pull the boat to the surface. My father was treading water and not helping her at all. He seemed quite calm. In the end she knew she had to just allow the boat to sink. There was no way she could pull it to the surface on her own. She awoke terribly upset. The dream disturbed her immensely. She realised that she had to stop trying to keep Chris alive. She had to stop organising her life around her attachment to him. ‘I have to be me. I have to be Gail.’
She stood in front of her dressing table and took off her wedding ring still on her left hand’s wedding finger. She hung it on a chain, never again to be worn on her finger.
Apart from fees from a handful of paid speaking engagements, Gail still had no real income. She needed to find a job, not just for money, but for her own sanity. She wanted to wake up in the morning and have structure in her life, to know that her work was valued because of the dollars in her bank account.
Throughout all the years that she didn’t formally practise as a physiotherapist, Gail never gave up her registration and the continuing education to maintain it.
One early morning as she was entering Kelly’s Bush, she held her chest and pleaded, ‘Christie, please help me find a job.’
Not long afterwards Adam’s partner, Jaya, feeling depressed about Adam, went into the tearoom at the care facility where she worked as a nurse. Rose Boulos, a physiotherapist, walked in to find her in tears. Jaya explained that her partner had died of an epileptic fit. Rose said, ‘That’s what Professor Chris O’Brien’s son died from.’
‘That’s who he was,’ said Jaya. ‘Chris O’Brien’s son.’
Rose sat down at the table and talked to Jaya for two hours. During the course of the conversation Jaya told her that Gail wanted to get back into physiotherapy. Rose said she wanted to help and gave Jaya her phone number to pass on to Gail.
Gail phoned Rose and they arranged to meet at an aged-care facility in inner-western Sydney. They sat in the sunshine for some time talking about Chris, Adam, life and death. Rose had actually attended Chris’s state funeral. She said Gail would be perfect working in the company in which she was a supervising physiotherapist. It was called Vivir — Spanish for ‘to live’ — and supplied health services to aged-care facilities.
Gail’s prayer had been answered. She was hired to work part-time at a beautifully appointed new facility in Rose Bay called Beresford Hall.
Not only had Gail retained her skills and knowledge, but she now had qualities that she could not have learned at the NSW College of Paramedical Studies all those years before. She brought wisdom, compassion and tenderness to her role as a physiotherapist. These made her a favourite among patients. One was Martin Eissenberg, a builder crippled with Parkinson’s disease. Gail would take him down to the gym, get him on an exercise bike and make him walk in the parallel bars. It was such an effort, and was never going to rehabilitate him, but he loved it and Gail liked spending the time with him. I was once on the phone to my mother when Martin shuffled past her in the hall. ‘I’ll come to your room shortly and give you a massage, Mr Eissenberg,’ she said. He didn’t hear and she repeated herself.
‘Oh, I’d love it if you would,’ I heard his German accent say loud and clear, as he had moved very close to her and the receiver.
There was Iris, who must have once been very beautiful. She had written a book about her life. She had no children but was loved by nephews and nieces. Her lower legs were so swollen that Gail would remove her pressure stockings and massage the fluid-engorged limbs. One day some of her glamorous friends arrived and, thinking Gail was the beautician giving her a pedicure, they tried to book themselves in.
Then there was Stephen, only in his forties and suffering from the same brain tumour as my father. Stephen languished in that nursing home for months, making Gail see another fate that her husband could have suffered.
Gail spent a lot of time with Stephen as she mobilised his limbs and got him out of bed. He was very heavy but sometimes she managed to get him standing by the bar, like a ballet barre, in the hall. They spent a lot of time talking. He was very fond of Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist, and had stuck a quote on his wardrobe that read: ‘If something happens once it is unlikely to happen again, but if it happens twice it most certainly will happen a third time.’ Stephen and Gail had long conversations that traversed many topics, but especially life and death. At one point, Stephen — a gay man — looked at her and said, ‘I love you, Gail.’
Gail worked with Vivir for a year. She loved working with people and genuinely helping them, especially as she could see the immediate effects of her work. It felt good to be appreciated, too. She could heal herself through service to others, she believed. What’s more, she seemed to be able to offer the patients something different from the other staff.
Then she was offered a casual job at Hunters Hill Private Hospital. It was convenient being close to home and she worked in the rehabilitation gym and hydrotherapy pool of a very busy orthopaedic environment.
There was no time at all to think about her life outside those walls. That was healing in itself. Work became a release.
Gail persisted in her work for Chris O’Brien Lifehouse. After one meeting with chief information officers of other hospitals, Gail excused herself to go to her shift. She went into the bathroom and changed into her uniform, a red polo shirt and black pants, and returned to the table to say goodbye before she left. She learned later that the table had been surprised to see her emerge in a work uniform, realising only then that she had a day job besides Chris O’Brien Lifehouse.
Some patients at the hospital have said to Gail quietly, ‘I know who you are,’ and gone on to talk fondly about Chris. Recently, she was kneeling on the floor in front of a man and working on his knee which had recently undergone a replacement, when he bent down to her and said, ‘I nominated you for Australian of the Year.’ Gail didn’t hear him at first and asked him to repeat what he’d said. She was so surprised and delighted, that she responded, ‘Just for that, I’m going to give you an extra massage!’
In 2012, we were still surrounded by my father’s possessions, and my brother’s things had found their way home too. Although these physical traces had taken on an almost sacred form, my mother felt that it was time to let go.
One day, before leaving the house to attend a meeting at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, Gail carried Chris’s surfboard up the driveway. Chris hadn’t been a particularly enthusiastic surfer but would always take his old board to Whale Beach on our holidays. Gail would spot him among the handful of surfers as she looked from the window of our small flat onto the beach’s northern end. Now she propped the surfboard against the large camphor laurel tree on the nature strip and drove away looking at it in the rear-view mirror, watching as it became smaller and smaller in the distance.
When she arrived at the meeting at a café in Camperdown, she felt the deep well of sadness inside her that had been stirred. The purpose of the meeting was for her to introduce Petrea King to two operations employees at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse. Gail had been focused on her quest to ensure that the right people were advising and working at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse to help build a world-class integrative medicine or wellbeing centre. Through this, she had developed a relationship with Petrea, the well-known founder of the Quest for Life Centre in southern NSW and widely respected expert on matters of health and healing. Gail began to tell the group about the surfboard and became emotional. She had never cried in front of anyone at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse. But on this day a tear escaped as she described leaving it on the street, this tangible item from happy days gone by.
The employees seemed embarrassed. ‘Look on the bright side,’ one said, ‘someone will come along who really needs a surfboard and they’ll think this is great. You should feel good about that.’ Gail knew that this person had simply been trying to fill an awkward moment. They weren’t to know that nothing needed to be said; simply being present to her grief was enough. Later, when they were alone, Petrea touched Gail’s arm. ‘It doesn’t hurt them to see your tears,’ she said.
As time passed, my mother found it easier to part with clothing and items that she or I knew others would find useful. She collected all Dad’s lovely shirts — washed, ironed, hanging on hangers and protected with plastic. My uncle Mike, Dad’s brother, had told her he could store them in the spare room of his house, reassuring her that this was not breaking any bond or letting anything go. ‘I am just storing them for you,’ he said. ‘I’m storing them at my home. Occasionally I might borrow one. I will make sure to wash it and return it.’ Mike still has the shirts. My mother feels calm knowing they are with him. Now she is pleased when she sees one of her brothers or brothers-in-law wearing Chris’s coats or jackets.
After Adam died, Gail was invited to a fundraiser for bereaved children. She placed a bid of $100 in the silent auction for a voucher with a business called Organise For Life. She won. ‘It seems everyone else’s life is completely organised,’ she remarked to me back at home. A gentle woman named Angela Hunter, who had donated the item, introduced herself to Gail and came to the house. Together she and Gail worked their way through hundreds of items that had belonged to Chris and Adam. As efficiently as Mary Poppins but also sympathetically and delicately, Angela helped Gail to part with the unnecessary physical reminders that were ultimately burdensome. There were tears in the process, but Angela would gently suggest that Gail take a photo of the item, reminding Gail that the item itself was of no use to her but it might be to someone else. My mother was grateful for her empathy and kindness. Each time Angela left with a carload of things, Gail felt the burden lighten.
Of course, my mother was not only dealing with her own wellbeing — she was worried about my brother and me too.
After our elder brother’s death, James, then twenty-one years old, struggled on through his Arts degree but floundered as he searched for purpose and direction. He had a beautiful, warm girlfriend, Lulu, and close friends who supported him throughout. Mum worried that his atheistic beliefs made recovery and healing more difficult. But eventually, he found his emotional equilibrium through worldly and wonderful things: a motorbike and a rescue Staffie named Jericho. Mum encouraged him to study a Music degree, which gave his talents an outlet, introduced him to kindred people and nourished his soul through daily creative energy and purpose.
Then twenty-seven, I had finally finished my Law degree and completed several unpaid legal internships while continuing to work for Fairfax Media. But otherwise I was increasingly a homebody who needed more and more sleep. I was lethargic, thin and emotionally volatile with a pallid complexion. I attended counselling and was prescribed anti-depressants but Mum thought that a more holistic look at my wellness was required. She organised for me to see Professor Kerryn Phelps, who was immensely thorough in checking my state of health with full blood counts and a referral to a nutritionist. As it turned out the blood tests revealed slightly irregular thyroid activity. As I sat across from Professor Phelps at her Surry Hills clinic, a shaft of light came through the window over her shoulder and hit the right side of my neck. Professor Phelps cocked her head to the side, ‘I think you have a lump there.’ She felt my neck and, indeed, the light had revealed the shadow of a lump. Professor Phelps referred me to pathology at the Mater Hospital to have a fine-needle biopsy of my thyroid gland. When the clinic telephoned to say the results had arrived, the receptionist said, ‘Professor Phelps has asked you to bring your mother to the appointment.’ Mum and I sat in Professor Phelps’s office as she told us that the biopsy confirmed a thyroid carcinoma. I looked at my mother. Her eyes were glassy and her lips thin. She said something about the Biblical book of Job, and being tested. ‘This has to be caused by immense emotional stress,’ she said.
‘It’s a good prognosis,’ Professor Phelps assured us and we both sighed our relief. I understood that I had been set on a course that we would travel slowly and purposefully. Papillary thyroid carcinoma, I would learn, is a non-aggressive albeit malignant cancer that has an exceptionally high cure rate for small lesions in young patients.
Professor Phelps had researched the best surgeons in the field, but we knew who they were already — Dad’s head and neck surgical colleagues. ‘We’ll call Anthony Clifford,’ Mum said, and recited his office telephone number to Kerryn by heart: it was the same number as Dad’s as they had shared rooms.
Even though I do not have the same faith as my mother, I don’t mind telling this story as it is. That’s simply what happened — light came through a window, fell on my neck, and Kerryn Phelps was alerted to a lump that otherwise would have gone undetected, at least in the short term. There’s no doubt in our minds that Professor Phelps, the consummately thorough professional, would have detected the lump eventually without the help of happenstance. But it’s a good story, nonetheless. And it’s certainly one my mother deeply appreciates.
Today, having undergone surgery performed by Dr Clifford, the scar across my neck is barely visible. I re
main under the excellent care of endocrinologist Dr Anne Maree Kean and the Nuclear Medicine department at RPA for monitoring purposes.
The Ashes
The rain fell hard at the burial of my father’s mother in 1995 in the town of Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Rapids formed as it poured into the cemetery while our family stood and watched men heave with effort to lower the casket into the sodden earth. The drama gave the feeling that even nature paid homage to our loss.
By contrast, a crematorium lacks the atmosphere of a gravesite. There is no image and sound of effort as the body and coffin are lowered but rather a flimsy curtain inches a few metres across to hide the casket from view, making a pathetic little whirring sound as it goes. The finality of this moment is lost (evidenced by James sneaking behind the curtain anyway to have one last moment with his father’s body).
For several reasons cremations are increasingly chosen instead of burials. They do seem to provide a neater option. But we learned that is the case only if the ashes have a place to rest. My brother’s ashes were in the small cupboard in my mother’s room for more than three years. The cupboard was a special one, full of precious objects and memories. But it was wrong to keep them there. My mother felt that every time she opened it. Making a decision about where to place them was difficult. Not everybody has such an affiliation with the sea that they can be dropped in the ocean. So no decision became our decision.
On top of that, Gail’s mind had been going in circles about whether to sell our house. The possibility of doing this prompted her to have Chris’s ashes exhumed after lying in the garden for more than four years. Gail asked the gardener to bring them up. He did so, reverently and quietly, and let her know that he had placed them under the little stone seat. They too sat inside in a temporary place, waiting to be laid to rest.
This is Gail Page 20