Thirty Days Read online

  I often wondered how I would have played the role. I think there would have been a lot of grandstanding. I might have found a cause and sacrificed what was left of my life to it. I imagined myself in a tent in the Judean desert on a public hunger strike until Netanyahu and Abbas fixed their signatures to the peace treaty I’d formulated. In death, I could be Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King rolled into one.

  ‘What’s your bucket list?’ I asked her.

  ‘To just be. To protect our children for as long as I can.’

  ‘There must be one thing?’

  ‘To be a grandparent with you,’ she said, shedding enough tears to fill a bucket.

  Her sister asked her if she wanted to do something exciting. Fly in a hot-air balloon. Parachute from a plane.

  That wasn’t Kerryn’s way. She had no desire to perform her death or stage any grandiose moments. She simply wanted to spend her last days with her family and friends.

  But she also wanted to overcome the notion that her illness was a stigma. It became the hallmark of the way she lived out her last months. She did not want to be like her mother, who never spoke about her cancer, who behaved as if it was something private, a secret.

  Even though we might recite the psalm, Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, the truth is that most of us do not fear death in any real sense until it approaches us—death is just a grand abstraction that is supposed to instil meaning in our life. Some of us create theologies around the afterlife, visual metaphors of gardens we have visited in other incarnations. Or we imagine heavens where we will be returned to our lost mothers and fathers and gather around a table to feast on the favourite food of our youth. We recast death as eternity.

  Kerryn refused all these metaphors. She made her dying and her death her own. She made it specific. She refused to shroud it in secrecy and talked openly about her symptoms, her progress or the pain she was experiencing, or the latest prognosis. She, who all her life had been unfathomable, reversed her mother’s silence through openness and honesty. She made people squirm with her descriptions of the blood in her urine when the cancer spread to her bladder. She told people what it felt like to be depleted of all energy. She named her cancer and acknowledged to everyone, including my parents, that she was dying and that her days were truly numbered.

  Everyone around her noticed her metamorphosis. They were inspired by it, and remarked repeatedly that Kerryn showed us all how to die. In the words of our rabbi at her funeral, she proved ‘that one can transform the hideous affront and indignity of cancer into a triumph of the human spirit. She did it without denial or anger, sentimentality or subterfuge, but with a tough, vigorous eloquence, a startling directness, a delightful humour and a sweet pathos’.

  Perhaps her own training prepared her. Among a pile of work notebooks in a drawer of her desk, I found pages from a seminar she attended ten years earlier, in which she wrote about the antidote to ‘death terror’.

  correlation between death anxiety and amount of unlived life

  less life satisfaction: the greater the death anxiety

  Mantra: I am human and nothing human is alien to me. after death—identical to state before you were born

  There is a rabbinic saying: ‘The one who understands understands.’ The truth is, I don’t understand what I witnessed close up. But I am left transformed by Kerryn’s dual act of resistance and submission.

  There was only one time when she tried to evade the truth. My mother wanted to know exactly what the doctors were saying and confronted Kerryn at one of their weekly lunches.

  ‘How long do you have?’

  Kerryn didn’t feel it was the right place to relay what she had just learnt from her latest scans.

  My mother was relentless. She pushed and pushed until Kerryn held up a couple of fingers.

  ‘Months,’ she said.

  ‘Years,’ my mother heard, and ran out of the cafe to cry and smoke a cigarette on the footpath.

  Perhaps, after all, Kerryn’s choice not to correct her was yet another act of grace.

  It was the start of summer, seven months since her diagnosis. The doctors knew chemotherapy would only extend her life for a limited time. If there was hope, it lay in the emerging field of immunotherapy. The most famous drug was Keytruda, known primarily for curing forms of melanoma that had previously killed people. Despite insufficient research, early statistics indicated it might also have a positive effect on gastric cancer.

  Death with chemotherapy was certain. Keytruda was a punt, but the only available trials were blind tests—that is, there was only a fifty per cent chance Kerryn would be administered Keytruda. If the randomised test offered her the alternative, it would be conventional chemotherapy, the road of no hope.

  And so we registered for the magic drug. There was only one hitch: early treatments were often stopped because Keytruda initially expanded the tumour as it worked to develop its own auto-immune system. New research urged doctors to push through this phase until things improved.

  If things deteriorated, we asked, how would we know if it was a sign of Bad–Good or Bad–Bad?

  No one had an answer.

  We arrived in the oncology ward for the infusion. It looked like chemotherapy; it was administered into the arm like chemotherapy. But there were two differences: it operated on the principles of genetic therapy, and it required us to hand over a credit card, from which nine thousand dollars was deducted.

  I must have been the only husband in the world who prayed that his wife would send us bankrupt—over a very long period of time.

  ‘If this works,’ Kerryn said, ‘we’re going to campaign to make the drug affordable for everyone.’

  The bad signs developed rapidly, but we hoped that Kerryn was falling into the category of Bad–Good. By the third infusion, the signs were indicating Bad–Bad. Kerryn’s stomach cramps were growing stronger and blood was colouring her urine. It might only be a urinary tract infection, the doctor suggested hopefully. To which Kerryn privately joked with us: ‘Yes, and it might be an elephant or a zebra or a Martian inside me.’

  After more tests, it became apparent that the tumour had now spread from her abdomen to her uterus, lungs and pancreas. The good news: it wasn’t in her liver.

  But the focus had shifted onto the third line.

  In a text message to her brother Glenn, she wrote:

  We know bad stuff happens. And we manage and make good lives for ourselves. That’s what we do. xxx

  Voice Message from Kerryn, 9 December 2015, 3.09 p.m.

  Marky, can you pick up the phone? I just remembered I need a blood test before chemo tomorrow. Can you come home and take me?

  Love you.

  Love you.

  Love you.

  Note to self:

  I must not listen to that again.

  I must not listen to that again.

  I must not listen to that again.

  We were running out of ammunition. And time.

  Our lives were coming to resemble the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. We hadn’t yet reached the funeral part, but we did fit in two weddings during the ten months of Kerryn’s illness, as well as the birth of a grand-niece.

  ‘I want to kidnap her as my own,’ Kerryn said, dreaming of the one major bucket list item she would never live to tick off.

  And, out of left field, we were thrown one more celebration. Our son Gabe and his girlfriend, Gabi, decided they wanted to get married ‘sometime’ after summer. After seven years of dating, it could hardly be classified as a shotgun engagement, but it was clear they had both agreed to celebrate their commitment while Kerryn was alive to witness it.

  Gabe wanted to surprise Gabi and set the date for late January.

  Kerryn had to hold out for another month.

  I remembered her words from early on in her illness: I don’t want to die my mother’s death. She wanted her own story—and part of that meant not fighting against all odds to beat the cancer, as Sally ha
d done in order to be present at our wedding.

  ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light,’ Dylan Thomas wrote. What use was rage? If there was beauty to be found in Kerryn’s response to her dying, it was in the grace with which she submitted herself to a fate that was out of her control.

  The engagement would be our last family celebration. Gabi received a video phone message in Sydney from Gabe who was in Melbourne. Throughout the day, Gabi was led from one family member to another, each of whom recalled a moment in their history as a couple, and handed her a Scrabble letter. Together the letters would spell M-A-R-R-Y M-E. She spent twenty-four hours crying from elation as the proposal unfolded. It began with her meeting her parents at a lookout in Sydney, where Gabe had taken her on her first date. Their car had broken down and Gabi’s father had come to the rescue. He now opened a bottle of champagne as they looked out over the ocean, then moved her on to the next station in the progressive proposal. After meeting her grandparents, close friends, sister, and finally her brother, who surprised her by flying in from his home in Los Angeles, she was driven to the airport, where the whole family flew to Melbourne.

  At the airport she was met by Sarah and Rachel—her new sisters—and driven to meet me and Kerryn at a bar in town, where we had first met the young couple. We sat at the table together, ordered the same cocktail and cried. After taking Gabi to my parents, who embraced her, we drove her to a secret destination in South Melbourne.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said as she approached the building. ‘This is where Gabe first kissed me. How did you teach your son to be so romantic?’

  ‘You never proposed to me,’ Kerryn said, after we dropped Gabi off at the hotel.

  ‘We were different in those days. We considered it bourgeois.’

  ‘No, you were different. Romance has never been your thing.’

  ‘Didn’t I remarry you a few years ago? That was romantic.’

  ‘Sure. Romantic for a Torah scroll.’

  ‘Then what else is romantic?’

  ‘What you’re giving me now—your attention.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that proof that we’ve always loved each other? Give me thirty more years and I swear I’m there for you till the end.’

  ‘You want to kill me off at eighty? Why not ninety?’

  ‘I don’t know why you even allow yourself to question my love for you. It’s as if, because of everything you’ve been through, you don’t trust me.’

  ‘Maybe that’s part of it. But sometimes I think you’ve been married to the characters in that novel you’ve been hiding from me all these years.’

  ‘That’s crazy. I haven’t shown it to you because it’s not finished. But, yes, I’d like you to read it now.’

  I looked at her sheepishly. I didn’t know how to answer her and was relieved when the silence was broken by my beeping phone.

  We clicked on the message: it was a picture of Gabe and Gabi wearing huge smiles, her arm hanging over his shoulder, sporting a ring—the same ring my mother had given Kerryn when we got engaged.

  The following night, the engagement party was held at our home. An hour before the guests arrived, Gabe curled up on our bed and cried the same refrain.

  ‘I’ll never be happy again,’ he sobbed. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get through this party.’

  ‘I’ll show you how,’ I said with bravado. ‘We’re going to dance and celebrate. Exactly like Zaida has done at the Buchenwald Ball all these years.’ But I, too, was afraid of the party and the emotions it would unleash.

  If Kerryn ever deserved the title of warrior, it was for her demeanour on that night. None of us was game to speak. Only she was brave enough to say the words that we were too terrified to utter.

  If not for her tiredness, which forced her to spend much of the time seated, no one would have known she was ill. She appeared healthier than ever. Her speech—legendary now among those who heard it—was Kerryn’s way of atoning for the silence that had been locked away inside her.

  ‘I come from a dysfunctional family’ were her opening words. All she ever wanted to do in her life, she continued, was to make up for what she had lost, by giving love to her children.

  ‘Two thousand and fifteen was a difficult year for our family. I was to learn that an aggressive form of stomach cancer had made a home in my body. I was always a high achiever. But 2015 was something very different as well. It was the beginning of a love story, a love story that enveloped every part of my life.’ Then she went on to shower love and gratitude on all the people in her life. It was a parting message to each of the children, her declaration of her pride in who they had become. She spoke of her siblings, of their pain and their love, and she honoured my parents, who would have sacrificed themselves for her if they could.

  She spoke of me as her shadow, ‘whose every action was a symbol of love. The way he stayed with me in hospital each night when I was vulnerable. The way he keeps me safe and makes me feel I’m not alone in all of this. My smart husband who never cried, started to cry a lot.

  ‘This is my love story,’ she said. ‘But with one qualification. Unlike in the film Love Story, I never believed that love means never having to say you’re sorry. In a marriage, one has to know when to say sorry.’

  I knew she had nothing to apologise for. It was I—through my periods of self-absorption—who needed to beg forgiveness.

  But Kerryn wasn’t looking for pity.

  ‘There is nothing to be sorry for today,’ she continued, ‘certainly not for me. Despite the aching pain in my heart, I feel so blessed and filled with the happiness of a celebration that gives me a taste of all the good things to come.

  ‘L’chaim,’ she ended, raising a glass. ‘To life, to you all.’

  13

  ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK

  That night, in our living room, Kerryn and I taught our children that we were capable of dancing through our pain. Immediately after Kerryn’s speech, our friends played traditional wedding songs and we joined hands as a family and danced. And then my parents jived to their anthem, ‘Rock Around the Clock’. Octogenarians on different ends of the decade, they were still up to showing us all that the clock never stops.

  That dance, that party, was Kerryn’s way of saying farewell. She was ready to retreat into the family. But the clock was also ticking for our planned trip to Sydney the next week for part two of the engagement party. The children in particular wanted more celebrations, more of their mother.

  The morning after the party at our house, Kerryn dragged herself out of bed, exhausted, and began the task of mopping the floor and tidying the mess. We all helped, but she insisted on cleaning, even on her knees. By the end of the day she could barely move.

  Next morning, Kerryn was in the oncology ward having a double dose of chemotherapy. We brought in all the leftover cakes for the nurses.

  But after the break from treatment, the extra dose hit Kerryn hard. By Tuesday she was vomiting and almost paralysed from tiredness. I was caught off guard again. I had grown used to her wellness, had witnessed the performance she had put in at the engagement party, and never doubted she wouldn’t rebound in a day. While she was lying in bed at home, I told her I was going out for a jog.

  ‘Mark,’ she said, ‘can’t you see?’ I detected a note of anger. ‘I can’t move. I can’t drink.’

  It was one of those rare occasions when her fear emerged: she was frightened to be left alone. I called up the hospital.

  ‘Bring her into the Emergency Department,’ they said.

  Kerryn didn’t resist. She was dehydrated and knew she was in danger. It took three doctors and two nurses—six punctures in all—to find a vein. By mid-afternoon she was admitted and spent four days in hospital, hitched to an intravenous tube that fed her extra doses of steroids and anti-nausea medication.

  By Saturday afternoon Kerryn insisted on leaving hospital. She was still weak, but declared she was ready to fly to Sydney. That night, I called Qantas and ordered wheelchairs�
�one for Kerryn and two for my parents.

  When asked if she was ready for the wheelchair, my mother took one look at the young woman at the check-in counter and scrunched up her face.

  ‘Me?’ she said, insulted. ‘You can use my wheelchair for yourself.’

  So we all hobbled onto the plane. Kerryn had tried hard to find seats up the front for my parents, fussing over them as if she herself wasn’t in need of help. We have photos of us all shlepping the luggage, my parents bickering about who would pull their wheelie bag.

  We got to Sydney in time for the engagement lunch on Sunday. Kerryn spent most of the time seated, and I was in my familiar role of protecting her.

  Gabi’s friends had framed the M-A-R-R-Y M-E Scrabble pieces. And we all posed for the cameras, as though the intervening days of chemo and hospitalisation hadn’t occurred.

  After the engagement parties, Gabe and Gabi were on such a high they announced that they wanted to have the wedding soon.

  We never expected this. The engagement was Kerryn’s farewell—it satisfied her that she had danced, spoken and broken the plate of betrothal with Gabi’s mother. Would it be wanting too much to schedule the wedding, too?

  Kerryn was surviving on a regime of Taxol, the chemotherapy drug used for those who drew the short straw in the blind trial for Keytruda. The schedule was so tight that barely a week passed without infusions. And then we were told that her blood count was too low to tolerate another dose.

  We told the oncologist that the wedding was set for 17 April: three months away. For Gabe, it was a matter of having his mother walk him down the aisle to the canopy. Despite Kerryn’s condition, he and Gabi had been buoyed by the lessons of the past week—that we could dance and cry at the same time. As long as Kerryn was alive, we were not mourners.