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.
