Thirty Days Read online

  She smiled deliriously at us. But I knew that, in her mind, all the scenarios that mattered were over.

  We put a sign up on Kerryn’s door. Strictly No Visitors. She was weak and the staff were telling her she would remain in hospital for at least a week, if not more. Every day, I sat with her, waiting for our doctors to come—sometimes catching them, other times missing them because of a toilet break.

  After a few days, the palliative-care doctor came, and sat with us for over an hour. Pulling up a chair, she cut straight to the chase. Kerryn only had weeks to live.

  The prognosis had been downgraded. I was shocked. It sounded like a worst-case scenario.

  ‘I want it to be quick,’ said Kerryn, ‘and painless.’

  The doctor explained the miracles of palliative care. She promised there would be no pain. ‘You won’t live a day more than you have to,’ she said.

  That brought a smile of relief to Kerryn’s face, which turned to a disappointed frown at the doctor’s next words:

  ‘And not a day less.’

  Kerryn and I had discussed the euthenasia tablet Nembutal that could be bought from China. I had even searched for it online.

  I mentioned it to the doctor, who seemed shocked, given my Jewish background, that I would bring up euthanasia.

  ‘There is palliative care,’ she said, more in the tone of a preacher than a doctor, ‘and there is killing.’

  I didn’t interrupt her as she elaborated. ‘When I give lectures to my students, at first they think they are in favour of euthanasia, until they are asked to consider who will actually take responsibility for ending the life of a person.’ Her words reminded me of the famous Milgram experiment of 1961, which proved that ordinary people are willing to inflict harm on others if, by executing only one component of the deed, they can evade culpability. ‘Palliative care,’ she said, ‘allows you to die painlessly, as nature wants it.’

  Once again, I detected in her words that Catholic mission of caritas. I didn’t entirely disagree with her, not least because Kerryn had still maintained her dignity throughout her illness, and never took on the worst signs of cancer that disfigure a person. Her brain was fully functioning, and her body was not as skeletal as the images of the Facebook stomach warriors.

  But when I met our oncologist near the lifts, I stopped him and said, ‘Kerryn has asked that this process be as quick as possible.’

  Tormented by my responsibility to Kerryn, I didn’t know if I was an angel of compassion or a murderer.

  At the end of another conversation the following day, the palliative-care doctor turned to Kerryn and said, ‘I’m worried about your husband.’

  ‘I’m worried too,’ Kerryn confirmed.

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s focus on you.’

  The doctor was insistent that my ‘okayness’ would crumble when the end came. She recommended I see a grief counsellor, a well-known psycho-oncologist. The psychiatrist turned up the next day and counselled me in a room behind the nurses’ station.

  ‘I’m concerned that Kerryn’s life will be unnecessarily prolonged,’ I began. ‘I’ve been entrusted with her medical power of attorney, and I promised her that she won’t suffer.’

  ‘From what I’ve seen,’ he said, ‘it’s Jews and not Catholics who find it hardest to let go. After all the suffering they’ve endured through history, they want to extract every ounce of life they can get.’

  I was surprised by the directness of his response, but it resonated with me, particularly in relation to Orthodox Jews who impose prohibitive restrictions on the turning off of life-support machines.

  ‘The religious prism through which I view life is human dignity,’ I replied. ‘There is no virtue in suffering.’

  The main thing I got out of that counselling session was a solution for my insomnia. I had joked with Kerryn that if I was to see a doctor, I would say, ‘Doctor, doctor, I can’t sleep.’ To which the doctor would invariably ask, ‘Is anything unusual happening in your life?’

  According to the psychiatrist, however, my turmoil was not the cause of my sleeplessness. My addiction to benzodiazepines, which were short-acting, was the problem. After taking two tablets for so long, my body was craving them, and causing physical restlessness that forced me to pace the house at night. He prescribed a longer-lasting drug, one that was at least twice as strong as my current dose.

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘Twelve hours,’ he said.

  ‘So does that mean I’ll be like a zombie during the day?’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said, in a matter-of-fact way.

  I went home and that night took one of the new pills. As I lay alone waiting for it to take effect, I thought about the ancient tale of four rabbis who crossed a field. One went crazy. Would that be me when the time came? Another lost his faith in everything and became a recluse. A third couldn’t bear it anymore and took his own life.

  Only one—the legendary Rabbi Akiva—made it to the other side.

  ‘You know why he survived unscathed?’ the rabbis asked. ‘Because he entered in peace, and so escaped in peace.’

  Maybe I should take a second pill, I thought.

  The first two days after surgery, Kerryn appeared to be recovering. She walked around the ward block wearing her gym gear. Fluid-filled bags hung from a tripod. The best-case scenario from the operation appeared to be progressing even better than expected.

  But on the third day we noticed a decline. She lost her appetite; she was growing weaker, and her breath was shortening. We didn’t need a doctor to tell us what was obvious: the bowel obstruction had been a symptom of the cancer spreading. But Kerryn and I kept talking about the wedding; we pretended, afraid to admit that she might not reach the next stage of chemotherapy essential for prolonging her life.

  Before the operation, Gabi’s family had come from Sydney to finalise arrangements for the wedding. I left the hospital to sit with them and Gabe in a nearby cafe. We spoke frankly.

  ‘No matter what,’ I told them, ‘this wedding is happening. Kerryn will be there. And if not, we are going to follow her wishes and dance through it.’ Then I turned to Gabi. ‘But is this what you want?’

  ‘I want what you want,’ she answered.

  ‘But what do you want, Gabi? Do you really want this shadow cast over your wedding?’

  It took her a second to answer, ‘I want us to have Kerryn there.’

  I know she did. She loved Kerryn, and couldn’t imagine passing up the possibility of her mother-in-law being present. But as a doctor who worked in an oncology ward in Sydney, perhaps she already knew.

  Did I?

  After a few days, during which Kerryn’s condition stabilised, she decided it was time to come home.

  I was cast out of our bedroom into Gabe’s old room. She wanted to arrange the pillows on our bed to simulate the flexible angles of a hospital bed. But we couldn’t find the right position for her, so the next day we had a palliative-care chair delivered. It was like a green barber’s chair. We placed it in the TV room and tried out the contraption that allowed it to bend along sections of the backrest and footrest.

  But there was no comfort for Kerryn. Her belly was aching and distended, her breathing was agitated, and the operation wound pressed against her insides. We all knew the truth: nothing would ease the intensifying pain. She agreed to put a pain-relief patch on her arm. When that didn’t work, she added an analgesic to her drug regime. She was barely eating, her mind focused on finding a comfortable resting position.

  Every time I suggested that we bring in a proper hospital bed and provide her with full-time nursing care, Kerryn refused, adamant.

  Months earlier, a volunteer grief counsellor had visited our home and asked the question that seemed impossible to contemplate at the time.

  ‘Where do you want to die?’ he had asked.

  ‘I can’t answer that question yet,’ Kerryn had said, slightly put out.

  It was no longer to
o soon to answer that question.

  ‘I want to die in the hospice,’ Kerryn told us now.

  ‘Why?’ I said, on the edge of tears. I wanted her at home. In our bedroom.

  ‘They’ll manage the pain better there.’

  That was her main fear, but there was also something else. She knew we would live in our house after she died. It was one thing to have the memory of illness pervade the house, and quite another thing to have death haunt it.

  Ironically, a few months before her diagnosis, Kerryn had casually mentioned that perhaps it was time to downsize our home.

  ‘No,’ I said. We were in our mid-fifties, and I wasn’t ready yet to prepare for early old age or late middle-age—the pension, retirement and all that. She meant none of those things, of course; she just found our house too large for the two of us.

  ‘You’ll have to carry me out of this house in a coffin,’ I answered.

  That night, Kerryn had her first death dream. She told me about it the next morning, crying.

  ‘Marky,’ she said, ‘I dreamed we were at the airport, at the gate ready to go overseas—to America. Just as the gate opened I turned to say goodbye, but it wasn’t your face anymore. It was my father. By the time the doors closed, I realised I didn’t have insurance. I panicked that I would never be able to get back to you.’

  Days before her death, Kerryn would say to me, ‘Don’t worry, I’m only going to America—you’ll find me there.’

  15

  NEVER LETTING GO

  This time it was for real. She may as well have gone with nothing more than her nightie. As we drove through the streets we had traversed a million times, up Kooyong Road—past those other familiar roads: Balaclava, Inkerman, Alma, Dandenong—turning left into High Street, I was overcome by a sense that this territory we had occupied all our lives—our small place in it—was about to evaporate forever.

  We parked our car in the hospice, near the green, arched entrance. We’d been told that only one bed was available—it was a busy week for the dying. The room was smaller than the one Kerryn had stayed in months ago, and there was little privacy. The central lounge area, with its couches and chess tables, could no longer conceal our fate. Kerryn was relieved to roll into the bed and to experiment with the contraption that tilted it in contours to suit her body’s needs. But nothing helped. She may as well have been on the barber’s chair in our home, or in our bed piled high with pillows.

  She clung to the rails as if she was stuck in a cage. ‘I want to leave.’

  ‘Love, if you give up this bed there’s no guarantee there’ll be any left in the morning,’ the nurse answered.

  ‘I’ll go home for a few hours,’ she insisted, ‘and I’ll come back here later tonight.’

  Instead, she received a shot of morphine. At first it didn’t calm her. She was pacing the room, delirious.

  ‘Take me home,’ she moaned. I would have done so in a heartbeat.

  ‘It takes fifteen minutes to work, love.’

  In those fifteen minutes, Kerryn was ready to storm out of the hospice. I had repacked her belongings, which included my own pyjamas and toothbrush.

  By the time we were ready to leave, the morphine had kicked in. Her eyes were closed.

  For the first time, I wondered morbidly how long it would be until morphine carried her to her death…

  It was a Tuesday night in mid-March, 2016. Over the next day, Kerryn stopped eating. Ice chips were all she could stomach. The children took on the role of her servants, filling cups with ice cubes from a bucket in the hospice freezer and pouring them into a machine that crushed them into edible flakes.

  She could still walk to the bathroom on her own, but she was growing weaker by the hour. Most of the time, she lay in bed. I scarcely left her side or slept.

  We just watched Kerryn breathe. She was still conscious and vibrant, despite the high doses of morphine. It sounds almost funny now, but she talked to the children about attachment theory, her therapeutic specialty. It was abundantly clear that all three of our children were primarily attached to their mother. Kerryn still had the clarity of mind to dispense advice tailored for each of them. She elaborated on their personalities and the type of person they should couple with. She warned against relationships where two people avoid confrontation. I knew she was speaking to me through them, hoping I would be able to guide them.

  Later, when we were alone in the room, as though she could read my mind, she whispered, ‘Marky, I want you to write our story.’

  Why had she changed her mind? I gripped her hand and wept into her palm.

  I knew.

  It wasn’t that she wanted her life immortalised, or that she wanted it written for the sake of the children, or the grandchildren we would never share.

  She was saying it for me. She knew that ever since writing The Fiftieth Gate, I had struggled to write another book. I had made attempts over the past twenty years, writing and rewriting novels, but when I finally gave her a draft a few months before she died, she read it quickly and said, ‘There’s no love here. You’ve become so disconnected from life, you’ve lost the ability to write with empathy.’

  Was it true? Had I really wasted two decades writing a novel that lacked love, or was that the wrong question? Had I wasted myself—and us—over these precious years?

  That was Kerryn’s gift to me.

  By dying, she was telling me to write our love story—to embrace our love, even though it was too late to make up for those lost years.

  Her illness and death had reignited the spark we both recognised from our early days, and brought our marriage back to its original source.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I love you.’

  It felt too late for more while my wife was dying.

  Nurses came and went, massaging Kerryn with cream. As her liver began to fail, she developed a suntan, a shiny jaundiced look. The children relieved her itching, rubbing her all over. It reminded me of my own youth, when my mother would smear Vicks VapoRub on my chest when I had a cold.

  Kerryn never lost her mind or her dignity, but as the days trickled on she purred like a cat, reduced to the most minimal needs. She never looked eerily sick; the memory of illness that so often fills the mind of survivors is one thing I knew we would not have to deal with.

  During those last two days, before she fell into unconsciousness, she spoke to each of us.

  ‘Do you want your birthday card now?’ she asked Gabe.

  I knew what she’d written, how she wished she could protect him from all the pain and disappointment, so that he could feel safe and happy all his life, exactly as she’d written to the other two children.

  ‘I’ll give it to him on his birthday,’ I said, knowing they were both too weak to read her searing words of devotion.

  She gave what she had left in her. Mostly she blew kisses, and repeated how much she loved us, how lucky she was to have the children she had, and me as a husband.

  ‘Love your children,’ she told each of her own. ‘It will be hard, because you’ll want me there.’

  There were other last-minute messages.

  ‘Marry someone who will take care of you.’

  ‘Make sure Dad gets his spots checked. He needs to stay healthy for you.’

  ‘Emotions don’t last, neither the good nor the bad. Same with happiness and sadness. Nothing lasts forever.’

  ‘I think I’m dying. I feel I’m disconnecting. I’m sorry.’

  ‘So it’s not an elephant after all,’ said Rachel.

  ‘No zebras,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Nor Martians,’ Kerryn said quietly.

  The text messages kept pouring in, but she no longer read them. An entire community was grieving through SMS. I only read a few to her.

  Her sister Ann wrote: Love you and will look after Marky and the kids. Xx

  Her brother Glenn also wrote from a place of inconsolable rawness: Was thinking about the 12 or 13-
year-old Kerryn and what her dreams would have been. The dream is ending too early but it all came true.

  I never wrote messages like that. Looking back, most of mine consisted of a single word.

  Awake?

  The question was sent from another room in our house, waiting for her to reply Yes, so I could come in and encourage her to get out of bed, to take her tablets, or so I could just lie with her and talk.

  A day before she died, her siblings came to see her. They hovered, slipping in and out of the room, avoiding farewell speeches. What was there to say?

  By the time we realised there were no more words to communicate, it became a one-way conversation. The itching ceased; the hunger for ice chips was satiated. All that was left to do was sit and watch.

  I lay on the foldout couch and moved the hospital tray to the side, so I could watch her. All I could see was her chest. I strained to watch its movements, synchronising my own breaths with hers. They seemed both fast and slow at the same time. There were long gaps between them; I counted the seconds, but the breaths were too shallow to allow me to keep up. Her body was breaking down, her heartbeats approximating death.

  Each time a nurse came in I asked the same question: how long? No one wanted to commit to a definite answer. Statistics can’t determine the destiny of any particular person. The most they would admit to was ‘a day or two’. She was young, they all said, her heart was strong. It was difficult to distinguish between her bodily breakdown and the effects of the medication that had been increased to ease the transition to death.

  ‘I want to talk to Mum one more time,’ Rachel said.

  ‘What would you ask her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I just want more time with her.’ All three children said the same thing.

  But no one dared lower the dosage so they could say those extra words. And there was nothing more Kerryn could say or acknowledge that a lifetime of devotion and love hadn’t shown us. She was there, but not there, a breathing body, approaching irreparable breakdown.

  We clung to her small movements. The children would erupt if they saw her move an arm or turn slightly. The puckering of a lip must be a kiss. She was communicating with them.