Edition 510 – The Last Sunset
It was just before 8pm last Wednesday. I wandered the myriad of corridors, rode the elevator to the floor above, pressed the buzzer, then waited patiently outside the doors to the Intensive Care Unit at Tamworth Base Hospital. Inside two or three minutes, a familiar figure shuffles along. My stepfather. He’s carrying a shopping bag.
“Have you pressed the buzzer?” he asks. I reply in the affirmative, and that’s about the extent of the conversation. No welcome. No shaking of hands. Just two generations waiting there, to be led inside.
In not much more time, the door is opened and we head in, him taking the lead. “This is Lynne’s son” he offers to the nurse. We exchange greetings, and she gives me a short update, as we enter the room. It’s my first time, ever, inside of an Intensive Care ward.
As the door slides open, the first image that strikes me is of my maternal grandmother. The same face. The same hair. I’m transported back, almost instantly, over three decades, to the last time I saw that gentle lady. Except, it’s my own mother in front of me. Eyes closed, with wires and tubes everywhere. Her chest rises and falls with the sounds of the respirator.
The phone call earlier that afternoon had asked me to make the mercy dash, 500km by road, as her condition was critical, and she was not expected to last the night. I spent 90 minutes with her, watching this once strong, stubborn, woman in her final hours. Behind her, a large window faced out to the west, where the most glorious sunset was taking place over the mountains. A bright vivid orange took hold of the cloudless sky, and I wondered to myself, is this her last sunset?
In the early hours of Thursday morning, I was called back to the hospital. She passed just after 2am. I sat one side of her now lifeless body, with my stepfather on the other. There was some conversation, but mostly silence. He was grieving. My overwhelming feeling was simply, what a waste.
We’d been estranged for two years. She may have been capable of loving, but certainly not towards me. She lacked affection. However, when you grow up with that, you accept it, don’t you, for you know no different.
What I couldn’t accept was her complete lack of interest in and care for my own children. Two beautiful, young men, that she would not even ask me about in conversation, as if they never existed. That was the deepest hurt, and yet, when apparently I’d spoken harshly to her two years ago about her lack of preparations the last time she was in hospital, I’d upset her. There was never a two way street in this relationship.
In January 1994, I’m at the wedding of a school friend on the Gold Coast. The father of another great mate, who once was my Scout leader, shared a drink with me at the reception, as we discussed family dynamics. He knew the difficulties of my family life, and somewhat opened the kimono just wide enough to indicate he too, had had a difficult family life growing up.
“I made the decision years ago, that if the family you grew up with can’t accept you, or don’t want you, that I’d better go out and create my own”.
And that’s it. There’s the family we grow up with, and then there’s the family we ourselves create. Sometimes they blend beautifully, as I’ve seen so often throughout my career. I can think of one family that I’m currently working with, where there’s an intergenerational one-ness about them. The parents welcomed a son-in-law into their lives, who now, along with his wife, have accepted their own children’s new partners into theirs. That’s nothing but unconditional love, from everyone.
Then there’s other families where there’s a fracture, that is sometimes repairable, and other times, not. I’m from the latter.
I’ve remarked more often than I care to remember, that I had to meet my wife, to work out what a “normal” family was like….however you define “normal”. To this day, I’m blessed that is still the case.
This Week’s Tip
“When you accept that you can’t change others, in spite of what you’d like your relationship with them to be like, there’s a certain spirituality attached to how freeing that can be.”