This is Gail

by O'Brien, Gail

  The prayer after communion concluded the mass, and Keith moved down the steps to collect the last eulogists, my mother and me. It was my turn to speak first, and I felt too numb to be nervous. The night before the service I had read out what I had written to my boyfriend, Gareth. ‘It’s a really good start,’ he had said with gentle encouragement. At 11pm and having considered it finished, it was not what I had wanted to hear. But Gareth had helped me to keep writing, and by the next day, the words seemed to lift off the page on their own.

  ‘My dad was wise, but youthful. He was respectful but irreverent. He had incredible willpower, but an insuperable sweet tooth. He was a leader. He was an equal. He maintained that we are all the same, just at different stages of our lives and careers. He demanded excellence of himself, but only wanted us kids to do our best. If our best produced excellence, all the better. He was our father and our friend. He was my best friend.’

  When Mum stepped forward, she was completely composed. ‘My name is Gail O’Brien,’ she began. As she spoke, her voice did not break once. She seemed stronger than ever, as though being supported by an unseen force. ‘It actually took great stamina, patience and a certain cunning to be married to Chris,’ she said to muffled chuckles. ‘But the last two and a half years brought us even closer together than either of us could ever have imagined.’ She described those last days and thanked those people who had been so important. ‘For all of us, may our tears of grief be replaced by tears of joy at having known such a man. He raises us all up to higher standards of selflessness and goodness towards our fellow man.

  ‘Christie, I know that you are revered in heaven even more than you were revered on earth. Until we meet again, the children and I will walk in your footprints and continue to be inspired by you, my honeybun, my Dr Gorgeous.’

  It was over. The pallbearers took their places around the coffin that we had chosen. It was a modest casket as befitted a man from humble beginnings, of light-coloured wood and with wooden handles, not too much shiny brass. Patsy had been concerned about the pallbearers carrying it all the way down the cathedral aisle. ‘It’s a long walk,’ she had said, but Gail had insisted, ‘I want Chris to be carried.’ Patsy lined up eight men who were so dear in Dad’s life, keeping the shorter and taller together, and supervised as they heaved the casket onto their shoulders.

  ‘Right foot first,’ she said in a low, firm voice. And they led us out into the bleached daylight. Old friends from Marist Brothers led a cheer and the crowd clapped as the hearse rolled away. It was a glorious end to an extraordinary life.

  Everybody went to Guillaume’s restaurant at the Sydney Opera House for the wake. ‘Now, this is a party!’ Mum yelled to us over her shoulder with a grin as we entered. She led the way through a mass of moving shoulders and faces, hands holding champagne glasses and extending for hors d’oeuvres. People wearing suits and dresses in black, navy and grey wedged themselves onto the balcony and the top floor, and cascaded down the stairs into the main body of the restaurant. The room roared with noise as guests shouted, laughed and cried, draping their arms around one another, clinking glasses and wiping away tears. Decades of friends and acquaintances brought with them Chris’s entire life.

  We family members were the last to arrive, having come from Macquarie Park crematorium. A few hundred of us had proceeded to the more intimate chapel setting, where Carmel and Dad’s brother, Mike, had given eulogies. Carmel and Phil’s son Matthew had played ‘Fields of gold’ on guitar. Col Joye sang and played ‘Just a closer walk with Thee’ while Father Kev improvised jazz piano riffs to accompany him. They finished with ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’ — encouraging the chapel to join in. The chapel service beautifully complemented the reverential authority of St Mary’s Cathedral.

  Now we were at the wake in the midst of a wild, roaring bash, generously hosted by Guillaume. The microphone was passed around freely, and stories about Chris were met with a combination of raucous laughter and tears. When Michael Besser began to speak, his solemn tones hushed the crowd. He read ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley.

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate,

  I am the captain of my soul.

  Gail sat on a dark cushioned seat that curved along the wall next to the speakers. Chris was all around her. She heard a rowdy group on the balcony above — Chris’s friends from medical school and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. ‘He would have loved to be here,’ one of them said. But she felt that he was.

  Kevin Rudd went and sat beside her. ‘I want to ask your permission for something, Gail. Lifehouse should be named after Chris. Will you give your permission for it to be the Chris O’Brien Cancer Centre?’ Gail had not been surprised to hear Chris discussed on breakfast television on the morning after his death. Nor was the offer of a state funeral unexpected. Once again she was unsurprised. She and Chris had briefly talked about this possibility. ‘I just don’t want my name on a lemon,’ he had told her. A vestige of these words lay in her memory.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she told the prime minister instantly, thrilled at the thought of Chris’s name living on in bricks and mortar, a glorious testament to what he had lived for. Kevin Rudd put his arm around her. When the speaker finished, Mr Rudd stood up and reached for the microphone. ‘I’ve just been chatting here with Gail. She has agreed to have Lifehouse named after Chris. From now on, it will be known as the Chris O’Brien Cancer Centre at RPA.’ Cheers erupted as the crowd agreed it was right.

  Though Gail could not have known it at the time, her consent had shifted the tectonic plates under her life. By agreeing to this honour — and how could she not agree? — Gail had unknowingly burdened herself with an onerous responsibility. The task of honouring Chris’s name, guarding his vision, making sure that his name didn’t end up on ‘a lemon’ would be immense. It would be all-consuming. The decision had been easy. Its consequences would prove extreme.

  Where is My Husband?

  We arrived home at the end of that day entirely depleted. With the funeral over and our lives without Dad yawning before us, we yearned for the burden of caring again. It was a period of acute grief, which felt much like an illness itself. At times the mental anguish made Mum think she was going mad. One day as she was coming down the stairs to the front foyer she distinctly heard Chris’s voice say, ‘Pinkie.’ She looked around for him as naturally as if he were standing right there behind her. It wouldn’t have surprised her if he had been, his voice was that clear and strong.

  The impetus to continue living life through these months displaying some guise of normalcy is strong but misguided. Gail continued doing. In hindsight, we should just have focused on being.

  Gail had tickets to see the guitarist Tommy Emmanuel at the Angel Place recital hall. Chris had loved Tommy Emmanuel and they’d bought the tickets months beforehand. Now, ten days after his funeral, Gail gave Chris’s ticket to her friend Di. Gail wanted to listen to the music Chris had loved, but now it seemed pointless, like everything else. She was just going through the motions; trying to be part of a life to which she felt no connection.

  At the end of June she had an appointment with a dermatologist. At a regular skin check a few months before, the dermatologist pointed out that she had broken capillaries on her cheeks. She couldn’t have cared less at the time, but made an appointment to have the capillaries laser
ed. Now that day had come around, and she went. When she returned home, Adam, James and I were horrified to see how badly bruised her cheeks were. They became a deep purple colour and she was putting ice on her face for days. Having her capillaries lasered was a strange thing to do at such a time — we recognise this now. We have since speculated that it was almost a form of self-harm, a way to externalise pain that had built up inside.

  Everybody was kind and tried to pretend, or assumed, that Gail’s life was returning to normal. Friends suggested she go on a holiday, as if to say, ‘It’s over now so you can take a break.’ Many asked her for coffee. Within weeks of Chris’s death, a friend who was not particularly close invited her to an art class. Gail obliged and they agreed to have dinner afterwards. Even in those first raw weeks, she felt pressure to get back into life and do something to extend herself. The art studio was a ten-minute drive from her friend’s house and Gail offered to drive them both there. The still-life sketching and painting lessons were pleasant enough, but not the chatter of the students, who were oblivious to Gail’s inner torment. As the night went on Gail felt worse and worse. She knew she had made a mistake in agreeing to this; all she wanted was to be in the nurturing environment of our home. After class she endured a meal at a noisy Thai restaurant and drove home via her friend’s house, but the woman continued to sit in the car chatting. Gail felt like screaming, ‘Get out of the car!’ but didn’t want to offend this lady, whose intentions had, after all, been good. Gail finally escaped and fled home, exhausted, and went to her room and wept, overwhelmed with grief, pain, heartache and hopelessness.

  All we could do as a family was to stay close to home and be together. Home was a sanctuary; we all depended on each other to get ourselves through. Carmel and Phil stayed with us for a few more weeks. They cooked dinner and made us laugh. It was a wrench when they had to go back to their own place on the south coast, but they drove up to see us regularly. At the end of July they came up for Mum’s birthday, helping me to celebrate by giving her cups of tea and presents in bed in the morning. Adam would come over later in the day, and I preferred to let James sleep longer that morning. At night, we went for dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. When the fortune cookies arrived, we all took one and read out the fortunes. Mum’s was, ‘You are going to have a very long life.’ The entire table groaned: loudest of all, wearing a sardonic smile, was Mum. A long life? Right now that was the last thing she wanted.

  About a month after the state funeral our parish held a more intimate mass for Dad. Gail spoke again at this service but this time she was less composed. ‘The day following Chris’s death,’ she said, ‘a learned friend drew our attention to theology, in an attempt to answer that unfathomable question.’ She looked at me and began to cry at the pulpit. ‘Where is my husband now?’

  The ‘learned friend’ was Kevin Rudd, who had telephoned to ask how we all were. The boys were stoic and I was not, so he asked to speak with me. I nervously took the phone, feeling anxious about speaking with the prime minister. But the twenty-minute conversation was warm and flowing. He told me how painful it had been when he lost his own mother, and how much solace he had drawn from the exercise of seeking out a beautiful cupboard and placing her most precious keepsakes in it.

  ‘You’re probably asking yourself, “Where is my father now?”’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘There is a passage in the Gospel, the book of John, that addresses this question. It says, “In my Father’s house are many rooms: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” We cannot understand or even fathom this concept, of many rooms. Whether you believe in God or not, what is certain is that something happened in Jerusalem a little more than 2000 years ago, which caused ripples across the world.’

  As Mr Rudd spoke about these practical and spiritual questions of death, clearing his throat intermittently as he talked, I felt a little buoyed by the prospect of a clear and tangible task in finding a precious cupboard. And I deeply appreciated his scholarly contribution to the questions with which I was indeed grappling — where had my father and his love gone?

  One cold night I lay by the fire, listening to the recording of the radio interview Dad had done just before his last operation. Adam came and sat beside me, rubbing his knuckles as he had done since he was a boy. James joined us. Mum came in to find us together, flat and wallowing in the chasm. She lit a beautiful, thick, white candle her sister-in-law Lyndall had given to us. It was a memorial candle with an image of Dad printed onto it, and it burned slowly and assuredly, as if it would never reach the bottom.

  ‘Look at that flame,’ Mum said, as she placed the candle on the coffee table between us. ‘It’s there but at the same time it’s not there. I can see it, yet run my finger through it. What is to say that Dad isn’t like that flame?’ The three of us stayed silent. ‘Dad would not have left us,’ Mum said, defiant, willing us to know what she felt was the truth. ‘He loved us too much to leave us. And I’m going to find him.’

  Family lore has it that Gail’s grandmother Franny Bamford once had a premonition. Her cousin Hal had emigrated from Ireland to Canada, but he and Franny remained close, keeping in contact by letter. At the outbreak of World War I, Hal enlisted in the Canadian armed forces and was sent to France. Weeks later he appeared to Franny in a dream, standing by her bed then reaching out and touching her arm.

  ‘Hal’s dead,’ Franny said to her husband when she woke up. ‘He came to me in my sleep.’ She pulled her arm out from under the covers and showed the place where Hal had touched her. The skin was burning red hot.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Franny’s husband said. ‘Everyone will think you’re mad.’

  But in a matter of days the news indeed arrived that Hal had been killed. Call it intuition, Irish superstition, a family fable embellished through the generations. When told by my mother or grandfather the story is usually followed by a thin smile and unblinking eyes, as if to say, ‘It could be true. Who are you to say otherwise?’

  Following the service at Villa Maria, Gail was talking to a group of people just outside the door of the chapter hall when a kind-faced Indian woman with wild black hair took her hand and introduced herself. Her name was Veronica. She pressed her phone number into Gail’s hand and asked her to call. Gail couldn’t wait to ring. She was at the beginning of a journey in which any lead had to be followed. That evening, she closed the study door and dialled the number. ‘Today you asked, where is your husband. I felt that I had to respond,’ said Veronica. She explained that she had worked at Prince Alfred in the laboratory and had known Chris. She had great faith in God. She described peculiar experiences following the death of a close family member — explicit dreams and signs that she said were more than coincidence.

  A few days later, Gail went to Veronica’s home, where the woman served tea and shared her spiritual beliefs. ‘Chris is in a place where there is no more pain and no more tears,’ she said. She suggested that they recite the Lord’s Prayer together.

  Gail appreciated the gesture and kindness, but she needed so much more. And she didn’t know exactly where to turn.

  Soon after Adam had started attending St Ignatius’ College, Riverview, a large Jesuit college for boys, a fellow mother told Gail that she attended mass every day. ‘If I don’t go, I just don’t feel right,’ the woman said. Gail was impressed by her devotion, but she didn’t fully understand it.

  Raised Presbyterian, Gail occasionally felt something of an outsider at St Ignatius’.

  Adam, James and I had all been baptised Catholic and gone through the sacraments of reconciliation, communion and confirmation. It felt a natural choice for Chris and Gail to raise their children this way, with Chris having had a strongly Catholic upbringing. Our chosen confirmation names were illustrative of our young outlooks. So enamoured was he with the name Christopher, Adam chose that, even though it was already his Christian name. I happily took my grandmother’s advice of adopting th
e name Cecilia, the patron saint of music. James chose Saint Bartholomew for no other reason than being inspired by The Simpsons cartoon character Bart.

  Until I was about ten years old, Dad would take Adam and me to mass on Sundays, which we welcomed as it was usually followed by a treat of pain au chocolat. But as we children grew older and life got busier, the family attended mass less frequently.

  When I was about thirteen years old, Mum announced that she was converting to Catholicism. When Gail told her mother about her plans, Grace said, ‘I don’t know why you would bother. It’s all incense, bells and fuss.’ At the time, I did not understand my mother’s reasons. But I see now that, while there had been no need for Gail to convert before marrying Chris (as both of them considered this anachronistic), my mother appreciated the traditions, sense of celebration and community offered by the Catholic church — and our local parish in particular. She wanted the family to enjoy these together.

  Mum’s desire for the family to celebrate together was never fully realised. In his teenage years, James told us that he did not believe in God. I think Adam’s faith and connection to his Catholic upbringing were strong, but his shift work meant mass attendance was a rare occurrence. As I matured, I found that my own attitude to mass was similar to Dad’s: it was an opportunity to spend one hour connected to some kind of spirituality, meditating on something greater than one’s self. Now, my (irregular) attendance is driven by an agnostic openness and desire to support and be connected with the parish community, rather than any deeply held faith.

  Going to mass had answered a longing in Gail that she could not quite articulate. Perhaps her decision to convert is best summed up by the Christian philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal: ‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.’

  But as important as mass was to her, at this point in her life she desperately needed more. Eventually she would find nourishment both within and outside of the conventions of the church.