On Death
by Tony, NSW
IT Manager, Aged 43
Death is a strange beast. It lurks unseen in the corners of your life, seen on television and read in newspapers. Then one day someone close to you dies or is diagnosed with a deadly disease and the pain of it is brought home to you. From that point on it jumps out at you whenever it can. A film with a moving funeral and you're weeping, a famous person dies and it cuts close to the bone.
My first experience of this was a film. After my father was diagnosed with cancer (for the second time) I went to see 'Four Weddings & A Funeral' and during the eulogy scene I could not contain the raw emotion, I cried and cried. I must have missed the next ten minutes of the film as I couldn't focus through the tears in my eyes, yet I knew that it was just actors on a silver screen.
Sometimes the remembered pain sneaks up on you. The death of Princess Diana seemed easy for me to cope with. It was only the continued mourning that bought back the black shadow of grief. A news story about a minutes silence and a song at a football match was the first to bring the tears, that time.
When Andrew Olle died after a cerebral tumour caused him to lose consciousness it was more than I could bear, less than three months before my father had left me the same way. I could not help feeling for his three children and it seemed that the people grieving his loss on radio could not possible understand the pain they would feel.
That day in St Vincent's Hospital as my father died was anguish from beginning to end, though it was, in my heart of hearts, what I wanted for my old man. After he suffered a fit ten days before I had watched my father quickly slip away. Mum called me at work and told me he had collapsed in bed and I had almost flied over the roads to their home. I walked into his bedroom and saw him slumped over, mouth slack and immediately knew that some sort of stroke had hit him. My immediate thought was 'No, not this, please, not this,' knowing that neither Mum nor I could cope with looking after my father if it was a major stroke, knowing how much pain it would cause him if he was crippled by stroke, robbed of strength and power, a once active and powerful man.
By the evening before he died I knew that inside his sickly body he was gone, he suffered another fit that evening and the last of my father left us, only his physical death remained as the final act in the tragedy.
The next morning my mother rang to say the Hospital had called the family in. When I arrived just before nine they had moved him into a six bed ward by himself and it didn't take a doctor to see he was dying. Through the next hours I watched the laboured breathing, the weeping, unknowing eyes and drooling mouth and hoped that it would not be long. I just wanted him to survive till my brother arrived the next morning from Boston, he was travelling to Sydney, not knowing that his father was dying.
Sitting deathwatch. It sounds horrible and it is worse than you can realise, darker than you can imagine, until you do it. You sit, mostly silent, unless other visitors intrude. The main sound is the rattling breaths of a dying man and there is a small part of you occupied with hearing the in and out, noting a subtle change and relaxing again when it settles back to the hours old rhythm. You know that the man in the bed, someone you love, is dying; there is no question; there is no hope; no cure; no revival, coming back or return. This is the ultimate final act. A huge chunk of your life and your heart has been ripped from you and all you can do is sit there hoping that your presence will make for one fleeting moment the pain of the man in that bed just one fraction less and for that hope you sit there all day.
At around four I could take no more, there had been a constant flow of visitors through the day, the first one a very old friend of Dad's who did not know he was dying until she arrived. Caroline had visited almost every day as he lay in the hospital and her look as she realised that he was dying was like a mirror into my own soul. After she left she called two people and the word spread through a number of channels to old work friends all over Sydney. They left offices to visit a dying man they loved or respected.
Family friends visited, some new, some close to Mum had hardly known my father but had been touched in some way by him; perhaps only had him cook a few meals for them. All came to sit, however briefly, at the bed of a dying man and share our pain.
My mother and I talked a couple of times about whether or not we should phone Donna, my ex-wife. My father had loved Donna as much as if she had been his own, he had cherished and cared for her for years. When Jessica, my daughter, was born my father would have given them both the world and Donna had hurt him badly in a very angry and spiteful way quite recently. She had not talked to my father since before his last business trip. In the end I called her.
By mid afternoon there was always a few people there. By four I had to leave, if only for an hour or two. I was on my way back after an hour and rang to check, my mother wanted me there urgently. Ten minutes later I was close to the hospital and a friend rang to say the end was close and to hurry in. I had just parked the car when she rang to say he had died and I started to run across Green Park only to trip half way and in falling started to throw up. I heaved up my last meal and then continued on, greeted at the hospital doors by a friend I reached the bedside and fell to my knees beside his body and could not speak or move for what felt like days but was probably only a couple of minutes. While I was kneeling there a curtain was dragged around the bed and I was surrounded by white with only my mother and I on either side of the body; neither of us able to talk; neither of us able to move, stuck and rigid from the pain and grief.
At one stage I was alone beside the bed and I felt the hand of my ex-wife on my shoulder and shrank from her touch. Finally, alone in that white, billow walled sepulchre I made my peace, crafted a strength to exist through the pain from memories of the shell lying there, in better times.
When I came out I realised that the room was full of friends and relatives. I had walked straight past my Aunt and Uncle without knowing they were there.
It was hours later that my Mum and I left the Hospital and more time after that before I went to bed.
The next day I had to drive to the Airport to pick up Graeme, my brother. Meeting him it was impossible to know what to say, how to break the news. In the end I just blurted it out, 'Dad died last night' and he received it coldly, as if I had told him it was raining. That afternoon I took him to the Hospital so that he could see the body and once again you don't know what to say, what to do. Joy you can share, but even with a brother pain is a solitary thing.
Then came arranging the funeral. First talking to the 'funeral director' (a strange term - the one thing we didn't want him doing was 'directing' the funeral, we had enough people around who know how to stage an event, better even than he). We weren't concerned about the cost of the casket, but by chance chose a plain, simple one that was almost the cheapest they offered - somehow it suited the man who was to go inside it. Then came the death and funeral notices - we spent more time impressing on the man exactly how we wanted the notices and making sure he had the words exactly right than we did deciding on a casket and both Graeme and I were picky about the words - it comes from being two pedants, particularly when it comes to words and their impact.
Mum wanted a friend, Max Clayton, as priest and he suggested a few of her friends who have sung together before as a choir, one volunteered to play the piano and another the trumpet. A student of my mother's is a nun, and she organised a church hall in nearby Milson's Point for the service. Another family friend was arranging flowers and a couple more food for back at the flat. More and more people were gathering at Mum and Dad's flat. More and more people were being told that Dad had died and expressing their own sorrow. After the funeral notice came out on the Monday I was amazed how many of the people I called had already heard, the old boys network in the steel towns of Newcastle and Wollongong was spreading the word - one of their own had died.
The day before the funeral I taped some music. Jason, a close friend of mine, helped by suggesting some pieces we might like and I checked these with Mum. I also checked out the sound in the hall and set that up. The choir was rehearsing in the evening as I and some friends set up the chairs. Richard, the trumpet player, had become a choir leader and was leading them through their paces.
The day of the funeral is mostly a blur. I remember the happiness that the whole thing came together for Dad, with the exception of the legal requirements every single detail, every word spoken, and every note sung was by someone who had been touched by his life. The choir and music was superb.
I remember the sadness of standing up to deliver the first eulogy. I had written it in one sitting, typing away at the computer as the feelings and the words flowed out of me. There was a mass of faces in front of me, some I knew well, some only vaguely, others not at all. I remember the pride at hearing, during other eulogies, from the people he had worked with how he had profoundly affected their lives. I was amazed at the number of people who had travelled long distances to be there and at the strength of their emotions. Then after the eulogies everyone came up and placed a flower in the open coffin till the body was surrounded and covered by small purple blooms. On my father's chest was a copy of the 1988 Wisden, it had been missing from his collection, lost somehow, and I had given it to him for Father's Day only a few weeks before. As my final gift I wanted it to go with him. Two of the funeral places staff screwed down the coffin and helped my brother, a friend and I carry my father out to the hearse.
After we carried him out I stood at the door of the hall with my mother and Graeme. More than a hundred and fifty people walked past. Some friend's of mine had come to share with me and I felt so much better to see them there.
The family and some friends went to the Crematorium for the final part of his voyage. A small short service to say final goodbyes and he was gone.
We returned to Mum and Dad's flat. By now the whole place was full of flowers. More had arrived and were in the vestibule of the units, just outside the door of the unit. There must have been sixty or seventy people there for a while. I was holding myself together by sheer will. I asked my closest friend one favour, 'Keep Donna away from me, I don't care how, I don't care if you have to be rude. Just keep her away.'
I seemed to have the same conversation a hundred times. Occasionally in the crowd I came across a person I had shared his life with, perhaps a close family friend, perhaps someone we skied with and then the conversation was different. I shared memories with dozens of people. Then finally that day was over.
It took us months to decide what we would do with Dad's ashes. Mum eventually decided on a perpetual rose, then came the problem of what to put on the plaque. The answer came to me one day near Mum and Dad's place. You can see my inspiration there still. As you walk up the steps from Kurraba ferry wharf it swings on a black painted stand. My father was overjoyed when he was working in the concrete canyon across the water that he could be home so quickly on the ferry. Before his illness one of his great pleasures was being 'dragged' by my daughter Jessica, not even two, to walk down and then back up those stairs and somehow she managed to get a jelly snake from the small shop at the top of the stairs both on the way down and back. So look for that sign, and remember the man who climbed them uncounted times. 'They only live who life enjoy.'
Copyright © Australian Museum, 2009