Eight: The Shift

Thomas, 63

I lost my mother about 13 years ago, my dad about 9 and my sister about 5 [years ago]. My mum died in the space of four hours [which] was a bit of a shock.

My dad was declining and my sister, who was two years older, was looking after him. She was an academic. He did really well for about 5 or 6 years after mum died and then he was in his early eighties when he started to decline.

He had Prostate Cancer but it was very, very slow moving. He had these TIAs (Trans Ischemic Attacks) which are like mini-strokes. They sort of knock you around but they can’t actually see them on scans. He had a series of these and that sort of knocked him off a bit. Then basically I think he was sort of going into decline. That’s just an age thing.

My sister was caring for him and then she got diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer and he died about 12 months after she was diagnosed. I don’t know if he really understood the full gravity of what happened and then she died roughly about 12 months after he did.

It was very intense.

I think what it did was that it shifted my proximity to death. It was strange in that I reached a point where I was doing everything I could to be there and be supportive but ultimately you reach a point where you’ve got to decide if you are on the side of the living or the side of the dying.

I think that there is a great temptation to sort of go with the dying. As is, possibly it’s an ego identification. When people are dying, there is a path where you can gain identity and people get an awful lot of attention and an awful lot of sympathy by having hardship around dying relatives but ultimately that’s a very, very negative path.

[It’s like trying to get sympathy all the time, even if you are not consciously doing it. You are chasing it all the time.]

It’s a bit like being depressed. People can be very sympathetic and supportive to depressive people but it doesn’t actually change them being depressive.

At some stage, you’ve got to go, "They are dying and it’s shitty" but at the same time, there is life to be had.

I grew up in the Church and I was talking to an old girlfriend. We’d both been in the same youth group that my parents used to run.

We broke up when I was 19 or something and I sort of left the church then and I didn’t see much of her. Because she stayed living in the same area as my parents, she maintained contact with them. I re-established contact with her at the time, particularly when my father started going downhill. We’ve maintained connection ever since.

It’s interesting that she’s now going through that period of time when her parents are in decline.

I was talking to her last night about that experience [of having parents at the end stages of life]; and we were talking about how, when you are in the presence of death, there is a certain vibrance an aliveness that you want to reach out for.

[On behalf of the person who’s dying?]

No, on behalf of yourself. Because, otherwise you get drawn into and too identified [with death]. It comes back to the thing about the choice – do you want to be on the side of the living or on the side of the dying?

[In terms of acceptance], my father was great. He was always very positive and he was always very generous and eccentric. He always was encouraging people to become better people.

He was a very devout Baptist and very prominent in the Baptist Church. Ultimately, he lectured in the Theological College.

One of the very sweet things that happened was that I ran into one of his nurses in the Hay Street Mall. She said that she was going to the Theological College and that my dad had talked her into it.

Putting away the framing of any judgements of what was going on, even on his death bed he was encouraging people to be better people.

The thing that was interesting with my dad was that these TIAs had affected his brain. Probably about six weeks before he actually died, he said "I don’t know what’s happening to me."

I said, "Dad, basically you are dying and you’re going to go to heaven and you’re going to see mum."

He goes, "Well… that will be interesting."

My sister’s death was just terrible. She fought it every inch of the way. It was very messy.

I wasn’t actually with her when she died because I’d taken the punt that she wouldn’t die that night and I’d just gone home to sleep. Some of her friends were with her almost to the end and it was apparently pretty horrific.

She was seeking massive medical intervention right up until the end.

You’ve got to say that everybody chooses how they die but neither my father or my sister [did it well].

My father did it sort of well but it wasn’t one of these peacefully drifting off [moments] with the family gathered around. I think he peacefully drifted off and there was a Burmese guy who was one of the nurses there and he said, ‘I know he’s a Christian but I said the right Buddhist things as he died’ at 3am in the morning.

With my sister, it was just horrific.

My mother was English.

12 months ago we went to England and put my Aunt (my mother’s sister) into care and so I bought back a whole lot of stuff because we had to clean her house out. I’m, at the moment, just going through digitising a whole lot of her photo albums. I’m getting a much better understanding of my mother’s life.

There’s a very poignant thing in the photograph album because I think her family, particularly on her father’s side, was quite wealthy and there are a lot of very happy family photos in the late 1920s and early 30s.

They must have been wealthy as they had a very big car and big house.

Then in 1939, when WWII started, there were some pictures of houses in the road in which they lived in the south of England.

A few pages on, there’s a picture of a line of bomb holes. Where their house is, is another hole.

From then on, everything changed.

Her father was on the hospital ships in the Mediterranean.

There’s a history of family madness on my mother’s mother’s side of the family and I think everything fell to bits. You’d say today that my mother had PTSD.

At the end of the Second World War, they left to go to South Africa and she was 16 or 17.

She was very fond of her father and he was away and her mother was a bit nuts I think.

You know how you have this thing where migrants sometimes hang onto their national identity even when the nation moves on? I think she stayed more British than the British and [attached to] an England that doesn’t exist anymore.

She was very kind, very smart, very witty but damaged.

I think she did well but probably if she got therapy it would have been a whole lot better for her.

My dad was very, very kind and very supportive and a bit hard to get on with I think. He was a bit too irascible.

My father was born in Australia, as was his father. [There’s a] bit of Irish ancestry. My dad was a great guy. He was a self-made man. His father died when my father was 5. They were living down on the farm near Albany and they had to leave the farm.

He was also very smart. He ran his own businesses. He was an electrician. When he was in his 50s, he decided to go to University and he studied History and ended up getting a Masters Degree. He was sort of working towards a PhD when he was beginning to go into decline.

My mother had been a Secretary and Bookkeeper and they both went to Uni in their 50s.

They were both very active in the Church and I think they found that an opportunity to be charitable and generous and supportive.

Both of them in their funerals had a lot of people from a huge range of ages there. So… much loved.

They were a bit eccentric, particularly dad. I think he was probably a bit autistic, high functioning.

He’d get a project and just drive for it. Particularly when you try to do that in Churches where there’s a whole lot of people [with different interests], even though what he was obviously pushing for was right, he’d ruffle feathers. He didn’t seem to get that not everyone either had his priorities or wanted to work at the pace that he did.

The Churches we grew up in were Fundamentalist Baptist. Back then there wasn’t such a thing as the Charismatics but they would be like that fairly extreme thing you see these days.

When I started going to Uni, I started to think, I started kicking up the traces and got kicked out.

[My parents] didn’t leave the Church but they basically got ostracised I think because of my behaviour but that was the time then when they flipped over and went into the Theological College where there’s more opportunity for thinking. They found a more supportive environment.

I grew up in the foothills of Perth Bogan Territory [laughs] Forrestfield, Maida Vale, that area. It’s still Bogan Territory.

[My sister] is an interesting lady. I think she might have been Autistic too. She became an academic and worked in Aboriginal language. She’s a linguist in an Aboriginal language. Her area of specialty was looking at how Aboriginal kids learn English when they’ve got multiple languages.

She’s a very, very good academic. Have you ever heard that thing where people say that academia is a sheltered workshop for the intellectually abled? [laughs] I think it was a really good description of why my sister was such a good academic. She was unusual and it was almost like some of the traits in my father but more extreme. She never married and never had any relationships as far as [I know]. I think she went out on one date and just didn’t…

This is terrible. It’s black and funny but terrible.

As she’s going off to have her operation, because she was Stage 4 and so it’s basically a massive removal of everything, they give them the sedative and I was with her. They’re wheeling her off into the theatre and she goes, "I’ve never had intimate relationships with a man!"

On one hand, it’s a very, very funny black, black thing and on the other hand, it’s quite tragic and poignant.

She was mid- to late-50s when she died.

One of the things that’s interesting is that when you have Ovarian Cancer, it can get into the spine which it did. It was very … She had really bad pain. There’s a particular drug that is quite good for that and apparently it’s related to one of those [drugs] like Ecstasy.

It’s a bit like Meth and they got the dose wrong so for about two weeks, my sister was like the sister I always wanted to have. She was funny, she was a bit risqué, pretty cheerful then they adjusted the dose and she returned back to sort of shut off.

I have a sense of loss that it was always an aspiration to have a certain type of sibling and she never was.

[She fought it quite hard?]

Yeah… every medical intervention. This is a judgement but there wasn’t a lot of grace around her approach to dying but at the same time you have to acknowledge that everybody is doing the journey as they choose to.

You know that statement, "You live as you die" or "You die as you live."

[It’s interesting how the health care system is willing to engage with that or not. How much they’ll fight or won’t fight and it’s really quite confronting in some ways when they say, "No. Sorry. There’s no point." To accept that is actually quite difficult.]

I guess because my sister had private health cover and was fairly wealthy, it appears like the system will give you whatever you want to pay for and what’s available if you really want it. It’s just how it is.

After watching it all and being through it all, the position I now hold is that shit happens and it’s what you do with it. The other thing I’m also aware of is, there’s a whole lot of reasons but they’re not necessarily excuses.

So, there’s a reason why my sister chose to fight things but it’s not an excuse for me to feel bitter or resentful that I didn’t have the sister that I wanted. You just have to go, there’s reasons why she is. It took me a while to get to that position.

[I learned], particularly with my parents, the action of generosity and trying to find your identity through charity. I don’t mean charity in the sense of just giving away stuff, but in trying to have an openness and generosity of spirit.

I certainly got from my father… he tended to have that Irish ‘I want to stick it up the man’ a bit.

When you look back at the Baptists, they were the original Anarchists. When the Reformation was going on, you had the Lutherans and then Henry VIII’s Anglicans. But they were, in a sense, just taking the Catholic Church and getting rid of the hierarchy and putting your own hierarchy in.

But, then there were these bunches of Anarchist Theorists and they basically turned into the Mennonites, the Baptists, those sorts of non-conformists.

You could see why that was attractive.

All three of their funerals were very similar. I think they might have had the same funeral home.

They were all a bit plastic. The funeral industry thing is a machine and you certainly see the money. What they charge for what you get. That doesn’t matter but you do get the sense that there’s not… and also too, when you are in that distressed state, perhaps it is good that people make it easy for you.

My sister’s [funeral] was an absolute debacle because she got buried in the same plot as my parents. They’d had the back hoe to open up the grave [laughs] so the back hoe is sitting there, there’s dirt everywhere [It looks like a construction site] and the back hoe driver has got his kids sitting up on the tractor.

My Aunt almost fell in the grave because she slipped. You could have made a movie out of it. It was appalling.

At work I speak in public a lot so it wasn’t difficult to [speak at the funeral].

The thing that was most interesting was in my father and my sister’s funeral and going back to the Church that I got kicked out of. Having to negotiate the space between sticking the boot in or not sticking the boot in and, sort of, being there for the person that has passed away. Just have to go that some of the guys that were there were dicks but that’s my agenda, let’s just talk about my dad and my sister.

I don’t think we culturally quite know how to position ourselves in relation to death. There’s this feeling that you must go along and you must be sombre and tears must be shed.

There is emotion there but at the same time… I think that’s the thing that struck me most strongly was that we don’t know how to orient ourselves and it’s like an air of awkwardness. An awkwardness that sits between some sort of connection with the dead and grief and then ‘it’s just another day’. We don’t know how to negotiate that space culturally very well.

My daughter really misses her grandmother because … my mother was very loving and they were very close. They would be immensely proud of her but she misses them.

[All the receptions] were held in the Church so it was very much that tradition of Church ladies cooking. So you have the sponge cakes… so it was like that. Generally, no alcohol obviously but I was too busy meeting and greeting. I might have had one party pie that I remember.

It was just more… you’ve just got to be around there, be there for people who want to come and talk about their memories.

Having grown up in the Baptist Church, which is quite close knit, but I had left it when I was in my late teens or early twenties. In each of the funerals, there was that opportunity to reconnect with old family friends of my parents who I sort of knew of. It did sort of have that extended family feel and the reconnection thing.

[I visit their graves] once every couple of years but the thing that’s on my mind most is that, because my parents bought a 3 person plot, I would like to put my sister’s name on the grave [too].

Because my sister never married, she and my parents were quite a unit. They were very supportive of her and she was supportive of them.

On the gravestone, it’s got my mother and my father’s [names]. My wife’s a bit resistant to spend the money because she doesn’t see that… well, I don’t know what she sees.

At some stage, I’ll just have to go and actually get my head around where the name would go on the stone and then go and negotiate a good price.

I was reckoning what I could try and do is find some guy who’s a stone carver who’s a hobbyist and slip him $400 to go and sit of the grave and [chip away].

I’m probably going to give my bits to medical science.

Because it all happened quite intensely over a 5-6 year period, one of the guys I talked to – he used to be one of the Ministers in the Church – said ‘when you go through these experiences, you dig yourself a very deep hole and it takes quite a while to get out.’

I think that is very true and I didn’t realise how deep the hole was. I think it basically took 2-3 years before I felt like I could function ok. I was still doing business and whatever but it took a good 5 years before I felt like… in fact, it’s probably only the last 18 months/two years that I really feel like I’m firing back on all cylinders.

I don’t think I ever felt like I’m overwhelmed or that I’d lost the plot. It was more about ‘what does this mean?’

Probably the stuff I’ve struggled with more are questions of identity rather than functionality. I can function in the world but that question of ‘who am I?’

The analogy I think of [is that my family] are like the mountains in the landscape and suddenly the mountain disappears so you were orienting yourself. As in, I am my sister’s brother, I am my father and mother’s son and then those parts disappear.

When they disappear, then you have to re-orient yourself because they are such major parts of that identity construct. When those major blocks go, you’ve just got to ‘I don’t really know who I am now so I’m just rebuilding.’

Particularly, connecting with this old girlfriend who knew me from when I was in my 20s. She almost had more contact with my parents than I had because I was living away.

Also too, sometimes you get people come up and they expect that you have got their experience of that person.

My main challenge is not so much functioning in the world but it’s more rebuilding the identity. The good thing about that is that it’s an opportunity to let go of stuff.

[Being away so much] put strain on my relationship with my wife. When my mum died, we were living in Carnarvon. When my father went into care, we were living in Geraldton. Also, just the cost of having to fly down to Perth when dad was, in theory, going to die and all of a sudden I’d arrive and he’d be sitting up in bed drinking tea.

[My wife] got on very, very well with my mum and dad. Because her dad is such a dick, I think she sees the relationship with my father as being quite healing for her. He was a very nice guy.

Because my sister was very unusual and my sister was quite – I don’t know why – she was quite harsh and critical of me to my face but also to [my wife].

Apparently, in the rest of her life, she would be boosting about how wonderful her brother was. Who knows what was going on there!

I don’t think [my wife] got on so well with my sister.

I am a total nostalgia junky and I’ve got sheds and sheds of [their stuff]. Basically, it’s like a funnel. My mum died and then when my dad went into care, it went across to my sister and me and then when my sister died, it came down to me.

I was too sentimentally attached to stuff to have the energy to sort stuff so you just put it in crates and stuck it in sheds. Now, we’ve got it all in the shed down here. This is now 5 or 6 years later, I’m now at the stage of feeling ok about finally getting stuck in and sorting it all out.

The way I’m doing that is I’m digitising the image stuff. I got quite a bit of audio so I’ve just digitised that as well. Getting that all onto a hard drive, I now feel ok about letting go of the physical stuff. I’ll probably keep a few key photos.

I think my attachment is to the physical stuff.

It’s interesting because [my wife] comes from this huge family with seven on her father’s side and six on her mum’s. She’s got 51 first cousins.

For her to access family memories is… it’s there in people.

Whereas, for me, I’m basically about the only one left. I’ve got this aged Aunt in England and a couple of distant cousins so for me the physical thing and the images are really important.

Having that digital record… sometimes I look at all the digitising I’m doing and I think ‘no one is going to look at this’ but it’s important to do that action.

I think, for me, it is that question of identity. Being able to place yourself in [some sort of timeline] and also a landscape and know what the pictures are. I think that’s the reason I’m doing it because it’s something about connecting with identity.

They left us a bit of inheritance so I bought a very good quality, expensive coffee machine. So, whenever I have a coffee… it’s sweet.

It’s good to talk about it in this structured way because it represents like a distillation at a certain point of time and that’s useful.

I think it’s like that thing about it never leaves you but you can re-orient yourself toward it.

It’s also very human. I don’t think our culture understands the sense of death and separation very well.

There’s this story that there once was a time when we would sit around, we didn’t have television, we would just sit around with cups of tea and shoot the shit.

Return to Interviews

Return to start page