The last meal my father enjoyed was lemon delicious. On a humid, mid-January day he came home from Noosa hospital for lunch, lugging with him a Niki T34 Syringe Driver connected to his abdomen and the knowledge that it might be the last day he would sit on his deck and look at the ocean.
The syringe driver, or pump, which Daddy carried in a supermarket green-bag during his visit home, delivered an unforgiving cocktail of morphine, Maxolon (for nausea) and Haloperidol (an anti-delirium medication) through sub-cutaneous needles. “Sub-cut”, the expression that became so familiar to us through his last dreadful days, left his distended belly horrifyingly stained with blue-purple bruises.
But those bruises were the least and most superficial of his problems. His kidneys were failing; finally, after a four-year battle with prostate cancer, a series of doctors had told us that there were no options left, and Daddy’s advanced health directive, insisting that there should be no attempts to prolong his life, nor resuscitate him, was soon to be invoked.
We talk idly about last meals; food sections glibly ask celebrity chefs what they’d eat for their last meal; in Hollywood movies, prisoners always get the chance to nominate one … deep-dish supreme pizzas, double cheeseburgers followed by cherry cheesecake, fried chicken (I promise you, there is a website that will give you this information). But if you want to really enjoy a last meal when you know your hours are numbered, you would be advised not to let your kidneys fail, nor carry a pump delivering such a horrid drug combination into your bloodstream.
A few hours after Daddy returned to the hospital from his lunch on the deck, after wolfing down his favourite pudding, he threw it up. He threw up, violently, for the next week even though he ate nothing more than drops of clear soup and flat lemonade. When he was first diagnosed with cancer, I had cooked for him with a degree of desperation. The tofu, the salmon, the broccoli, the tomatoes, the pomegranate juice — all those prescribed ingredients that I’d urged evangelically that he eat — none mattered anymore. The lemon cakes and orange-marmelade cakes and chocolate puddings that I’d cooked to comfort him (and, most likely, me) … now they were useless too.
On Saturday, January 16, my father, my best friend, went into a coma. Eight days later, about 9pm on January 24, Daddy died.
And how are we doing, my mother, brother and I? We are getting out of bed and somehow placing one foot in front of the other. Various experts have told us what to expect — grief is a journey, they say. Others have drawn Venn diagrams to explain the intersection of emotions that we might feel at this time. But I feel as though my emotions are as blocked as my father’s kidneys were. An explosion must be coming and it won’t be pretty.
But for now, I want to tell you about my very special father. I want to share the eulogy I managed to give for him at what was a beautiful ceremony celebrating his life. I want you to read to the end and hear his message which, I’m proud to say, was celebrated in the Queensland Parliament on Tuesday, February 9 in a lengthy condolence motion, as well as in the Senate in a speech by Queensland Senator Claire Moore who attended the funeral as a representative of the Rudd Government. And my only regret is that the joys of lemon delicious as a last meal weren't debated in the Upper House of the Australian Parliament.
Peter Wood, A Love Story
I’d like to tell you a great love story. It’s the swinging 60s. London. Carnaby Street, the Rolling Stones, free love, the Summer of Love, the Sexual Revolution, Sex and the Single Girl. Girls’ skirts are getting shorter, boys are chasing those girls with ever-increasing ardour.
Over the past few years, Daddy wrote dozens of stories for me about his life and, in one of those stories, he mapped out his love life. You might like to hear of his playboy escapades, of bikini-clad Bardot-esque young women draped over him from Brighton to Biarritz, of the broken hearts strewn in his wake.
I’m afraid, though, I can’t tell you that story. You see, in the tale about his love life that Daddy wrote for me, he announces a shocking truth.
And I’d hate for you to think that my father’s lack of girlfriends was due to any physical or social failing on his part. As you have seen in the photographs shown today, Daddy was a handsome man. A shock of thick black wavy hair, a well-chiselled nose and jawline, and the most extraordinary sea-blue eyes.
You might like to hear how my dear mother, Robin, was left gasping for breath when she first met my father at a party in Tooting, south London. Trembling bosom, jelly-knees, fluttering lashes. Lovestruck.
I’m afraid, though, I can’t tell you that story either. Daddy gave this slender, fair-headed beauty a lift home after the party and she promptly forgot all about him. And, when he wrote her a letter — yes, a letter — sometime later, suggesting he’d like to meet her again, she replied in such a dismissive fashion that this suitor almost abandoned his quest.
But thankfully — thankfully for me and my darling brother David — that wasn’t the end of the story. Paris might get the glory as the city of love but, in this instance, London delivered in spades. This great love story I’d like to tell you, this love story that started in London, has twists and turns; along the way, it features Irish youth hostels, bus tours through Communist Russia, the 1964 Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, a chance meeting in Regent Street, canoodling in a 1950s’ Ford Prefect in Pall Mall and a mailbag of love letters sent to a pretty young teacher in London from a lovelorn aspiring politician travelling on the Orsova ocean liner on its voyage back to Australia.
There is a very fine and alluring denouement to this story — an elegant wedding in Pymble in Sydney in 1965 followed by a honeymoon in Terrigal on the New South Wales coast. The wedding, the honeymoon … they were the ceremonial entrance to my parents’ passionate 44-year marriage. (I suspect that my reserved, conservative father, completely oblivious to those swinging 60s, would disapprove of me telling you that I was born barely nine months after that Terrigal honeymoon.)
As a little girl, I was entranced by this love story that my mother told … “two drifters, off to see the world”, one from Sydney, one from Toowoomba. By the standards of the day, neither was young. Nudging 30, it’s possible that both sets of parents despaired that Robin and Peter would make a match. Yet somehow, in one of those miraculous, wondrous collisions, my mother and father found each other.
But this was no collision in the midst of a boozy party, no consequence of an era of free love and idle dalliance. This was the real thing. And it seems to me an exemplar of my father and his character, that he would settle for nothing less than this union of integrity, substance and commitment.
In the days before my father’s death last Sunday, when Mummy, David and I made his room at Noosa Hospital our second home, we all talked about many things, including, through torrents of tears, and some laughter, the format of this funeral. As Uncle Billie has explained, Daddy was very clear, even demanding, on this matter. He wanted today to be an informal and joyous celebration of his life. Above all, he wanted it to be a celebration of his love for my mother.
Now, I’d like to add that at least one of my father’s last requests has caused me some personal inconvenience. As many of you will know, organising a funeral for someone so greatly loved is an extraordinarily demanding and stressful exercise, sandwiched into just a few days. And I have to say I’ve passed on a few cross words to my father since Sunday. Two weeks ago, as we sat with Daddy in his hospital room, as his kidneys failed, he set me a challenge. “You are not,” he said, “to wear black at my funeral.” I have some dear old friends here today who will know the full dimensions of that challenge for me. I have spent many of the past few years living in inner-city, supposedly avant-garde Melbourne, where wearing black is de rigeuer. I now live in Sydney but black is a hard habit to break. Daddy, I hope the schoolteacher in you will forgive me for any grammatical errors today, for any factual errors, for any stumblings or falterings. Because I want you to know that, instead of sitting at my computer finessing my words of love for you, I had to spend too much time shopping for an outfit that wasn’t black.
It was early in 2005 that doctors announced that Daddy would die of prostate cancer in the foreseeable future. If there was any good to have come of such devastating news, it was that it gave us some time to adjust. Moments quickly became momentous. The focus narrowed. I listened and watched more intently, begged for more stories, revelled in our once-twice-or-thrice-daily phone calls, watched for fresh emails from peterwood10@bigpond.com to arrive in my inbox. I held his broad hand tightly, massaged his shoulders, embraced him at every opportunity and hungrily soaked up the joy he got from his gorgeous grandchildren, Marni and Finn, the children of my brother and his partner, Jo, who Dad adored as his own daughter.
So for nearly five years, I’ve been thinking of what I might say today. And I think what I most want to give are insights into the most decent and honourable of men, a man of great dignity, a complex and multi-faceted man who, despite great personal challenges, did his best for his family, his community and for the causes that mattered most to him. And a man of humility, neither puffed-up nor self-interested, a man who never fully recognised his own worth.
Peter Wood Number One is the public Peter Wood. The statesmen and visionary. The man who one senior community leader who is here today once said should have been Premier. This is the man that Kerry Shine has so beautifully sketched out for you. As a standard bearer for the Australian Labor Party, a member of the Queensland Parliament for nine years, and then as a councillor and later Deputy Mayor of this town, he always had a deep understanding of the issues and the rare ability to articulate them. He also was a man of such integrity that he would always stand up for what he believed in. On reflection, I’m sad to say that this combination — of great intelligence, articulateness and a courage of conviction — worked against my father. In his last term in office, he became the public face to communicate some unpopular decisions made by the Toowoomba City Council, which we think contributed to his election loss in 2004.
But I prefer not to dwell too much on that loss, nor the traumatic earlier ones through the '70s and '80s as he tried to regain a seat in Parliament. I prefer to dwell on his victories and to that end, I’d like to suggest to you all a way of remembering my father. As you drive through the streets of this city, today, tomorrow and in the weeks ahead, look for a few of my personal memorials to him — my father’s victories. The beautiful Empire Theatre in Neil Street. Daddy campaigned tirelessly for the preservation of the crumbling art deco theatre, a grand relic of the golden age of movies that was seemingly doomed for demolition. It reopened in 1997 and has been at the heart of Toowoomba’s culture and community ever since.
Next, The Toowoomba Regional Gallery in Ruthven Street. Housing the significant Lionel Lindsay collection and the city collection, it is considered to be one of the state’s top regional galleries. There’s a long, political story behind the return of the Lionel Lindsay collection to Toowoomba from the University of Queensland where it had been sent for conservation and a long story behind the creation of the Toowoomba gallery but few would argue that my father was the driving force behind it.
And finally, the charming heritage streets of the city. In the late 1990s, old houses and buildings were being demolished at an alarming rate. My father invited a Brisbane heritage architect to visit the city. Dad, his largely skeptical fellow councillors and the architect all piled into a mini bus and toured the city. The architect explained the heritage value of the city’s architectural heritage, from Victorian, to art deco, to structures from the 50s and 60s. The tour, combined with Dad’s advocacy, led to the council implementing a comprehensive built heritage action plan.
The Empire theatre, the gallery and the city’s heritage precincts — just three tangible examples of countless contributions Daddy made to the city over a lifetime.
Peter Wood Number Two is the devoted husband and father. In our childhood lives, Friday nights came to assume great importance. When Parliament was sitting, Daddy would spend weekdays in Brisbane, returning on Friday nights by train. Mummy would feed us, bath us, and put us into our pyjamas, then we’d pile into the old Valiant and drive down the range to pick up Daddy from the train in Helidon. I can still feel the excitement as we flew through Withcott, and crossed the bridge into Helidon. Daddy was home! This is the man who squeezed fresh orange juice for my brother and I every morning for the two decades or so that we lived at home, then followed that up by cooking us a hot breakfast. The man who would lie on the floor playing Lego with David and who built a television antennae out of a paperclip when the Lego pieces failed him.
In later years, he became my constant advisor through a series of school essays — on the Tolpuddle Matyrs, on Governor Bligh’s legacy, on America’s Dupont corporation and Ralph Nader. And, in my career as a journalist, he remained my constant advisor. Living in Melbourne, then Hong Kong, the arrival of email technology strengthened my relationship with Daddy ever more. He was always a writer, rather than a talker — although he was a great orator. Through his emails, alongside advice about the articles I was writing or editing (it needs to be shorter, it’s too long, was the regular entreaty), I learnt much more about this sensitive, thoughtful man and his life and about his cultured appreciation of beautiful things. About his love for and knowledge about art — his significant collection of books on Australian art numbers in the thousands — his love for classical music, requiems, opera, and I learnt about the values and principles he held dear.
Now there’s a third Peter Wood. And this is a story that is far harder to tell, an intensely private story of an intensely difficult struggle. Nevertheless, it’s a story that he wanted to be told today.
For much of his life, my mother’s darling husband, David’s and my adored father, suffered major clinical depression. Tragically, through the 60s and 70s, this was a condition so little understood, derided even. Daddy suffered silently and stoically. Thankfully, in latter years, he received treatment for the condition, some effective, some not so effective. I’d like to read, with some difficulty, a passage he wrote two or three years ago:
“If I was God, I wouldn’t be an almighty one; I’d be a humble one. If I was God, I wouldn’t expect people to beg and beg, calling it prayer, for me to relieve their pain. If I was God, my special people would be the mentally ill. I would be a God who knows of the hidden tears; the long black nights; the exploding head; the unending ache. I would be a God who knows the despair. I would wipe away the tears and take away the pain.”
This is the man that most of you probably do not know of and, strangely for my mother, brother and I, there is a community of people who know even more than we do of his suffering with this terrible illness.
Over the past few years, Daddy found great comfort on the internet — on an Australian website where sufferers of depression and other mental illnesses could talk to each other, find support, comfort each other. On this website, Dad’s code name was “Surfer”. On this website, it’s possible that my father did some of his greatest work. I have long known of his capacity for communication through words, of course, but on this website, inadvertently he became a guiding light, a consoler. I’d like to read to you an email from a woman called ---. Over the internet, Dad and ---, who also suffered terrible depression, struck up a friendship. Mum and Dad visited --- in a Sydney hospital’s psychiatric ward last year, and she was one of the last people he rang about two weeks ago before he slipped into a coma.
After the call, she sent Dad a text message, and I’d like to read it to you:
January 7, 2010
Hi Peter,
Your call yesterday was a beautiful gift... thank you. It lifted me from my own head space! A rare thing when severely depressed. I visited DEPNET and was brought to laughter and tears by your last entry. Having you on my side in the last few years Peter has touched me deeply. To think a man of your stature, grace, compassion and achievement would even have a thought for me, let alone in his last few days, both humbles me and empowers me. I think that says it best, Peter: apart from your intellect and humour, you humble and empower me. Your value to many, many people through the forum has been legendary — you make a difference every moment you are there.
Forever in gratitude.
Yes, indeed, my multi-faceted father is a man to be celebrated. I can hear him now, telling me to wind up, it’s too long, he’s saying, a short eulogy is a good eulogy. “I will,” he told me in those last days, “be banging from the inside of that box to tell you to wind up.”
But Daddy, let me say one more thing on your behalf. I know he would want me to ask today that you find compassion and understanding towards those suffering mental illness, and to those supporting them.
I love you Daddy.
