GRIEF is sharp and every moment spent with it hones the blade.
Every phone call, every sympathetic question, rakes over the freshly cauterised wound.
In a hospital there is very little respite from anguish, which is the reason for its existence. Without them the pain would be far worse.
In a hospital you have to follow the tide and the time you wish to spend with your loved ones has to be set to it.
Unfortunately, hospitals don’t benefit from the predictable movements of a celestial body.
Accident and circumstance are more likely to decide when you get time to sit and share precious moments with those you hold dear.
We were there visiting my wife’s father Russell Jenner, who was in the final weeks of his 18-month long battle with cancer.
Once carrying a six-foot-something farmer’s frame, he had been laid low by that terrible foe.
There are no flowers allowed in the room and the space seems to have one architectural influence in mind. Bleak.
Lighting is minimal, even the windows are dulled by generic pictures of nature and the mood lighting is set to ‘despair’.
Outside the room is a helpful little trolley with pamphlets on advanced care, how to create a memory box, how to create a life story and a stack of decades old novels with titles including Such is Life and Things Fall Apart to A Guide to Marxism and Marx and Engels: Basic Writings.
I’m not sure what they are trying to prepare us for; the end or the end of capitalism?
There are words of motivation on the cart. “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory”, a famous quote by Dr Seuss. A forlorn excerpt suggesting the children’s author was well acquainted with grief.
Looking around the ward, there is an endless parade of professionals, all dedicated to making lives better, patients getting wheeled to their appointments or just getting their steps in for the day and loved ones all putting on a brave face for the almost assured pain that is to come.
Perhaps one of the saddest things to witness is the parents helping their terminally ill children live out the final, excruciating days.
Back in our room the conversation is sucked out of our lungs as if we were in the vast void of space.
We’re desperate to talk about normal things because nothing about this situation is normal.
The people around you are the same people that the pitter patter of conversation usually comes as sure as rain on a wedding day.
The lack of inspiration comes from the fact that no one wants to the talk about the awful reality in the room.
We are soon to lose a father, a husband, a son, a grandfather.
How do you come to terms with that, let alone in a room so alien, so devoid of all the things we call home.
The plan was for him to spend his final weeks at home but - as with all plans - things changed.
At the beginning of the week we were told Russell potentially had more than a year
Then, as the week went on it was weeks and the goal was just to get him home.
Then uncertainty.
…
A chapter in our lives comes to a close when we lose a loved one, that person we were when we were alone with them, will cease to exist.
But what will never leave us is who we were with them, our memories.
The memories that will be indelibly marked in our minds are those of Russell and our son Lee and their Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin like capers on the farm. Who was Winnie and who was Christopher? That depended on the task.
I am eternally grateful for the time my son got to spend with Russell, not even two-years-old and he knows more about tractors than I will ever know. I’ve got him booked in to sharpen my mower blades next week.
…
The final days made the past weeks feel like hours.
Every minute spent expecting his final breath seemed to span an age.
Every agonising last goodbye repeated daily with no respite found in repetition.
Russell, like a great stone statue had been chipped away and torn down by some invading army, until all that remained was a fallen memory of what used to stand there so tall and proud.
Russell did end up being able to come home, a bittersweet victory as at the same time as his arrival home, so too did an invisible hourglass begin trickling sand.
Each grain one less minute there was to spend with a loved one.
That timer, as it turns out, was a very short one.
After a terrifying episode, we called an ambulance, where he was taken to the palliative care ward in Boonah.
There is a relaxed air, a calming waft in the halls of the Boonah Hospital. The ‘everyone knows everyone’ cliche was born here.
One of the nurses was named after my great grandmother, Pauline, and tells me all about it.
Care comes naturally here and there is a room adjoining the suite for family.
The following days are a precession of friends and family coming to say goodbye.
We’re able to wheel the bed outside and enjoy the winter sun and the cacophony of native birds warbling, tweeting, hooting, laughing and screeching.
Visitors and boarders are able to get to our rooms within 100 metres of the front door.
But all of these niceties don’t let you escape from the fact that on a little white board outside Russell’s room is scrawled with a small, grim reminder to all who tend to him: ‘no aid’.
…
I had come to believe perfection was one of those things like enlightenment - a wonderful idea but, for the majority of us, unattainable.
It seems to contradict itself - life is not perfect, otherwise it would be boring - ups are only up because we were once down. And so, people are not perfect but that is what makes them interesting.
I write all this knowing now, that people have the capacity for perfection.
Perfect moments. Perfect memories.
We have been fortunate enough to experience this.
The first that comes to mind and the only one I will not keep to myself was at a Christmas fair. Volunteers for the local progress association, Russell and his wife Jenny were helping out.
By the end of the night, Russell - already battle-worn and nearing the end of his first 12-month prognosis - looked tired, struggling to lift a chair.
That was when my wife, Tennille, brought our beautiful boy over in his stroller to meet up with us.
As soon as Lee saw Russell, he tried to leap out of his pram and get to his Poppy.
Unsure of what he wanted, Russell leaned down to him.
That’s when the toddler pounced on his unsuspecting grandfather.
He gave his Poppy the most heartbreakingly beautiful embrace a toddler could give.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but that was perfection.
