This is Gail
Page 22
Christmas 2006, one month after Dad was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour and given six to twelve months to live. He had already undergone his first of five craniotomies.
Radiotherapy treatment caused a patch of Dad’s hair to fall out, so he shaved the rest. Pictured here at Adam’s graduation ceremony from the Police Academy in Goulburn in January 2007.
Over the next two-and-a-half years, my strong, robust father became completely dependent on my mother. Her embrace of this role sent their love and marriage to divine heights. Here she rubs cream onto the sore surgical wound.
In the final months and weeks of his life, Dad’s left side became progressively paralysed causing his face to droop and he eventually required a wheelchair. In the mornings, Mum would gently smooth his hair away from his face. ‘How do I look?’ he’d ask. ‘Dr Gorgeous,’ she’d reply.
This is Mum’s favourite photo of Dad, taken in 2003 when he was the Director of the Sydney Cancer Centre. ‘I love this photo of you, honeybunny. Will you please write on it for me?’ she asked him. His handwriting was shaky but his mind clear and strong.
In September 2009, the governor-general Her Excellency Quentin Bryce presented Gail with Chris’s posthumous Officer of the Order of Australia insignia. It was a poignant ceremony in the grand reception room of Admiralty House.
Mum with my brother Adam, celebrating his twenty-eighth birthday, about one year after Dad’s death. A few months after this picture was taken, Adam suffered his first seizure. He underwent testing to look at the electrical activity of his brain and assess whether he had epilepsy but the results were inconclusive.
On the day of Adam’s last birthday, his twenty-ninth, a strong windstorm engulfed Sydney. A single red helium balloon entwined its string around the azaleas surrounding the cross that stood above Dad’s ashes in our garden.
Gail had never anticipated that she might take on any responsibilities for Lifehouse after Chris’s death, but she was invited to join the board of directors and it soon became an all-consuming and high-profile role. Pictured here in July 2013 with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Minister for Health and Medical Research Tanya Plibersek on a tour of the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse comprehensive cancer centre. (Photo credit: Chris O’Brien Lifehouse)
Over the years, Gail has been asked to deliver countless speeches, essentially filling a gap left by Chris and quite literally finding her own voice in the process. Life had taken a most feared and dreaded turn. But from the ashes, something new in my mother was rising. Pictured here at the official opening of the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse in November 2013. (Photo credit: Chris O’Brien Lifehouse)
Acknowledgments
Dear reader,
I deeply appreciate being given the opportunity to share my mother’s and family’s story, and am grateful to you for having read it. I do not believe in the slightest that our story is unique. Rather, I’d hoped that it would be worth sharing for the opposite reason: its themes and our experiences are as universal as they are remarkable.
The origins of this book lie in the days when my mother and father were promoting his memoir, Never Say Die. Quite unexpectedly we discovered an interest in my mother’s, the carer’s, account. As her story kept unfolding, I encouraged her to write the book which I believed beckoned. Later, it occurred to me that perhaps I could write it instead.
In my attempt to distil our busy and unscripted lives into a coherent narrative, I was faced with countless difficult decisions about what to include. Innumerable moments and friends have been omitted from these pages, but that is no reflection of how important they have been to us. I did my best to be guided by what I thought the reader might need and like to know.
This particularly applies to the passages about Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, which I must emphasise exists today because of hundreds of hard-working people who have played their own integral roles and been passionate to see it succeed. I did not intend for this book to lay claim to any glory, nor did I wish to diminish the achievements and contributions of others. I selected moments which shed light on my mother’s story and the themes therein. Today, more than ever, Chris O’Brien Lifehouse is driven by visionary and compassionate professionals. It truly is a critical mass of people with a unity of purpose.
I would also like to acknowledge the source of a reflection on page 88. The idea of hope resting between the x-axis on a graph and the curve that is falling towards it came from an enlightening conversation I had with Dr Charlie Teo.
Over the last two years, my mum has played a huge role in pulling this work together. She has spent countless hours being interviewed and dictating her answers, pored through old files and spoken to friends in order to reconstruct events, laboured over her letters and checked my work. I am forever indebted to her.
I am also thankful to Paul Cave, Bill Conley, Bob Rose, and Samuel Taufa (aka Junior) for their help reconstructing events, and Karen Bristow and Dominique Galea for their feedback on certain sections.
I was lucky to benefit from the expertise and advice of two dear friends and writers, who generously read my entire work: Stephanie Dowrick, who has been my teacher and mentor through this process and empowered me throughout, and Tom Ross, whose talent and friendship inspire and spur me on.
I have also found immense support and camaraderie in the friendships I’ve made in two groups: from a young writers’ group, the creative influences of Tom Ross, Augusto Mallman and Thomas De Angelis have enriched my writing. And from a course titled Writers Workshop with Stephanie Dowrick at the Faber Writing Academy at Allen & Unwin, Helen Greenacre, Jenny Levy, Father Peter McGrath, Sarah Menary, Katy Morgan, Sheridan Rogers, Penelope Smith and Fiona Hargraves have been wonderful companions on this journey.
My deep gratitude goes to the staff at HarperCollins Publishers for taking this project on (and sticking with it!). Catherine Milne and Amruta Slee were patient guides and Rachel Dennis, Pam Dunne and Jacqueline Kent improved the book considerably through the editing process. Matt Stanton’s creative talents produced a lovely cover and he was very gracious in his approach.
Finally, if it weren’t for Stephanie Raethel, my editor at Fairfax and Bauer Media, this book would probably not have happened. It was no more than an idea when I embellished its progress during a job interview with Stephanie, but her encouragement that I should find a publisher prompted me to commit to the work. It’s lucky I was so naive about how difficult it would be or else I probably would never have undertaken it.
About the author
JULIETTE ISABELLA O’BRIEN was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1984. After graduating from high school she studied a Bachelor of Arts in Communications (majoring in journalism) at the University of Technology, Sydney, and later a Bachelor of Laws at the University of Sydney. She is admitted as a solicitor in NSW but does not practise law. She works in digital media and is currently employed at SBS. This is her first book.
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2016
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Juliette O’Brien 2016
The right of Juliette O’Brien to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
O’Brien, Juliette, 1984– author.
This is Gail: life with and after Chris O’Brien / Juliette O’Brien.
978 0 7322 9964 4 (paperback)
978 1 4607 0357 1 (ebook)
O’Brien, Gail.
O’Brien, Gail — Family.
Life change events.
Bereavement.
Self-actualisation (Psychology)
Self-realisation.
920.720994
Cover design by HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover photograph of Gail O’Brien by Steve Baccon