with my parents watching my father struggling to fight the cancer and trying to keep positive about his outlook, when all the statistics indicated that, for a seventy-one-year-old man, the chances of survival were just a little bit better than zero. It was the last time that I would be with him when he was conscious, although I didn’t know it at the time, and there was so much I wanted to talk to him about. But I couldn’t find the words because I was so distracted by what was happening in my own life.
We drove around the country visiting healers; we played cards; and we spent time as a family. My mum, my dad, my brother, my sister and me—a family unit, just as we had been twenty-five years earlier. We hadn’t been together like this, without the distraction of our own families, for years. It was a bitter-sweet time and an opportunity to simply exist with each other, but I was consumed by the thought that I was part of two family units, and they were both breaking up. Too much of my world was changing at the same time and, to this day, I still feel cheated that I was unable to fully focus on my dad during his final few weeks of life.
I desperately wanted to tell these four people closest to me about my situation. I needed to talk about it and share my pain but my family was suffering enough and it didn’t seem right. My mum, brother and sister were all concentrating on Dad, sharing his struggle and hoping against hope that he would prove to be the one who, with positive thought and effective chemo, would beat the odds and survive this awful disease.
I lived, for a while, in the familiarity of my old house with my parents, surrounded by the trappings of a happy family life and a successful marriage. My brilliant mum and dad. Had I been lured into a false sense of security? Because their marriage was so good and looked so easy had I taken my eye off the ball—thinking that’s how all marriages are?
We sat on the sofa, eating homemade scones and drinking tea. All normal. Except that it wasn’t normal. My dad had a cancer growing inside him and I had my own personal cancer growing inside me. I wanted to blurt out “I hate to burden you at this difficult time but my marriage is over”. I kept it in. I wanted my dad to go to his grave thinking that I had a happy marriage and that my move to Australia had been worthwhile. My wife and I had already agreed that we wouldn’t tell the children about the forthcoming split, and we wouldn’t separate, until my dad had passed away. His ability to cling onto life would determine how much longer my own family had left.
2
Leaving me now
The mental pain of separation is tough enough but, as a special bonus, you also get some interesting physical side effects thrown in for free. I couldn’t sleep properly, I couldn’t eat properly, my heart rate was up, my blood pressure was up, I was angry, I was frustrated, I was sad and my eyes would occasionally well-up on the train to and from work. Annoyingly, everyone else on the train seemed happy and relaxed, iPods in their ears, reading the paper or just dozing. I wasn’t relaxed and I wasn’t happy. I wanted to tell the whole train what was going on in my life and that my wife was behaving like an idiot, but as an Englishman it has been ingrained in me that public scenes of emotion are just not on. I have been brought up to believe that worse things happen at sea. Personal tragedy is just one of those things that is best ignored—everything can be solved by a nice cup of tea.
I took to wearing my shades on the train—regardless of the weather or the time of day. Far better to walk into a piece of train furniture and injure myself, than to run the risk of people seeing my tears. One evening at Flinders Street station a kind little old lady asked me if I needed any help getting onto the train. I felt a bit bad about this but realised that, if I got onto the train with my arms outstretched, complemented by a zombie-style walk—or the kind of walk required after being hit in the nuts by Brett Lee—then someone would direct me to the special seat near the doors and make sure I was comfy. My dark glasses routine meant that I would never need to stand on a peak hour train again. We English are right—every cloud does have a silver lining.
So, during the final few months of ‘living’ with my wife (well, we were technically living together but we weren’t actually together), I changed physically. I thought I had lost a little bit of weight because I could get both my hands down the front of my trousers—it was like being thirteen again— but I wasn’t aware quite how much I had lost until I had a fitness assessment in the gym. This was a six monthly event that required riding a bike for twelve minutes while my blood pressure was measured (it had gone up quite dramatically), trying to touch my toes and do a full sit-up (I failed, but I don’t think I can blame that on separation stress) and performing various other activities which involved grunting, prodding and measuring. At the end of the session my instructor weighed me. I watched her go to my file to write down my new weight and look up surprised, before asking me to get back on the scales again. I am not a big guy and my weight had dropped from 73kg to 68kg—that’s an impressive weight loss of 6.8 per cent in Biggest Loser speak. I had also adopted the gaunt look. Heroin chic, here we come!
I was a bit disappointed that on my trip home to see my dad none of my family had noticed my spectacular weight loss and generally thin disposition. I was sure someone would either enquire about my new fitness regime or else ask whether I was feeling all right. Still, I suppose there were other things on their minds, and my dad was completely outdoing me in the weight loss and gauntness stakes. Compared to him, I looked good.
Meanwhile, my wife and I continued to put on a brave face for the children. We still hadn’t told them what was going on and had agreed it was important that life appeared to be normal, although I had become very dark and withdrawn. My wife took to sleeping in the spare room on the basis that she was “seeing someone else” and it would be “inappropriate for me to see her naked”. Weird—I knew every inch of her body intimately, and now it belonged to someone else and was off limits. Our cover story was that I still had jet lag from my trip to the UK and I was keeping her awake. But children aren’t stupid and they knew something was up, although they didn’t say anything at the time. They later told me that they thought it was me who wanted to leave the marriage, as I was the one who appeared to be unhappy!
In a vain attempt to make our last months together as bearable as possible, we introduced a few rules. My wife promised not to see her soul mate again until we had formally separated and were living apart. I promised not to discuss our ‘difficulties’—a word that I found, even as an Englishman, to be a bit of an understatement—with anyone else. I wasn’t 100 per cent convinced she was sticking to her end of the bargain. I once came home from work to find her in the shower (due to the ‘inappropriate’ ruling I didn’t try and see her naked), only for her to appear moments later in her exercise gear. She announced that she was off to the gym—the scene of the crime—and I suggested, completely logically in my view, that it seemed a bit pointless having a shower before she went. She told me, with a straight face, that she didn’t want to get there feeling sweaty. (Get where? I thought). It was ridiculous. I was worried that my wife, who had cheated on me and decided to leave me, was cheating on me.
Looking back, it seems stupid that I tried so hard to hold on to our marriage, but in my mind we had, seemingly overnight, gone from being happy to my wife wanting to be with someone else. It took a bit of getting used to.
A month later I was back in the UK. I had a call from my brother one Saturday morning. I was lying in bed, alone of course, hungover after a big night out with the boys—drinking was the one thing that seemed to come more and more easily to me. My brother told me that my dad was getting weaker very quickly and that I needed to get back there as soon as I could.
The prognosis didn’t sound good. They had made up a bed for him downstairs, he wasn’t eating or drinking, had pretty much stopped talking and a 24-hour nurse had arrived. That afternoon I was back on the plane again. It’s a long trip to the UK and it couldn’t go fast enough, I didn’t want to land at Heathrow to get a message that I was too late. But I needn’t have worried, my dad was a fighter and he waited for me. I arrived home just in time for his last two days.
My entire family—my mum, my brother and my sister—met me at the front door to my parents’ house. They looked worried for me. They had seen my dad’s day-by-day deterioration over the previous two weeks. They had seen his metamorphosis from a man who was