Opinion
We prepare speeches for weddings, birthdays and funerals but are strangely silent as our loved ones slip away.
The night Dad died is fading on me now. It happened in a bright room in a sister’s house where we rode the rollercoaster of his laboured breathing until nearly dawn. An internal tide rose, fluids seeping into each exhausted lung, bringing the death rattle on.
Early in the night there was a doctor who had seen this show too many times. He gave us instructions, a nod and a wink as to what could be done. That’s the morphine, there in the fridge. That’s the suffering man. This is what might be done by loving people with morphine for a suffering man. Then he left.
My elder brother was in another country, which made things harder because he’s what used to be known as “a man of action”, and I’m more a ditherer. My easy entanglement in contemplations of the possibilities usually results in what’s known as “ditherer’s stasis”.
As Dad’s disease advanced, making his life progressively less endurable, he’d often say, with vague wonder: “You wouldn’t let your dog die like this, would you?” It was truly surprising to him to have to endure, stoically, even, dammit, good-naturedly, what amounted to a daily zoological demotion towards an existence as limited as a newt’s – with buckets of pain thrown in.
As his lungs flooded that night, his breathing became sporadically becalmed. We thought he was dead several times, and we stilled our own breathing to listen to his fresh nothingness, gripping each other’s hands and facing, for the first time, a world without him. But each time his heart started up again, and we cursed him gently for his stubbornness.
About dawn his body drew the last of half-a-billion breaths, and I remember wondering what thoughts it might have fed, that ragged inhalation. Did its smattering of oxygen molecules power a fading reverie through to completion? A happy thought, I hoped. A cheering thought. A bright note on which to leave. A vision of his mum and dad, his brothers, or his kids, or of him as a limitless 17-year-old leaping on a fullback’s shoulders to mark a Sherrin, or kissing a girl for the first time, or leaning towards the Bakelite radio to hear of the Second World War’s end.
Since that night I’ve regretted that I didn’t speak to him. Two sisters and I sat quietly grieving, listening to his tenuous breath.
I’m now sorry I didn’t supply a monologue of happy memories, didn’t landscape his unconsciousness with the stuff that made life worthwhile – even, sporadically, wonderful. I should have talked to him.
But death was in the room, and death is intimidating company. Death threw me off my game. Why should something so natural, inevitable and ubiquitous be such a scold?
The enormity of death stops you speaking of it in its presence – even stops you speaking in its presence. But this timidity must be overcome because the last encounter with a loved one these days is so often while they’re comatose. Why are we not prepared?
It somehow didn’t occur to me that he might still be able to hear me in his coma … and anyway, if I talked, how would I navigate the fact that this talk was the last talk? It seems rude to acknowledge to someone that they’re dying – that they’re failing you by committing this irreversible breach in your relations. We’re all reluctant to mention our friends’ failures, and death feels like abandonment, and we don’t want to accuse our friends of that.
So he died in silence, though I’ve talked to him plenty since. Did he even know we were sitting there at his bedside? What a strange reaction, to let him go quietly into that good night when our voices might have sung like choirs through the chapels of his fading mind.
We prepare toasts for birthdays, write heartfelt speeches for weddings, and anguish over eulogies. Why do we not think to prepare a monologue to be spoken to the dying soul we have loved? Make it part memoir, part poem, sprinkle it with ad lib fondness … then throw in some jokes and some Shelley. Honour your moribund mate by assuming they’re as cognitively acute as ever they were – and have a natter. “Ha. You remember when we …”
Of course, had I done that, he may have thought: “God, I wish that bloody Anson would shut up so I can concentrate on what I’m doing.”
Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
