The Tyranny Of Distance Revisited

I flew in from the other side of the world. After more than 20 years away I was once again prepared to resume the role of eldest son around my parents house. By the second night I was already arguing with my mother.
It had started with my father being too sick to go down to the bowling club. It was my sister who had phoned and put me in the picture. It soon became obvious that this was his final bout with cancer.
I told my mother, “I think we have to talk openly about cancer and death. I think it’s what he would want.”
The bones in her old body cranked up and stood on end. She said, “You can’t do this to me. How can you dare hurt me? Do you want to kill me?”
I tried convincing her using words like openness and quality.
“I don’t want you to mention that word in front of him and not in front of his friends either.”
I recognised denial all too well.

My father was already convalescing at home, so called. He would receive his visitors in the lounge. He was weak and he was deaf. He would change chairs from time to time to try and relieve his discomfort, but wouldn’t put out the money for a new hearing aid. I would sit in on the sessions with his colegunkas listening to their stories. Nowadays they were mainly chewing over old times. That certainly made for a change. These were the men who’d made me feel unconditionally chided as a kid for not having enough yidishkeit.
My father told us once again how soon after landing in Fremantle he had headed off for the big smoke and worked in the sweatshops of Melbourne’s rag trade. He worked hard and made good money. But something was troubling his kidneys. I’d heard the story lots of times over. “Young man,” Dr Weary Dunlop told him, “the weather here doesn’t suit you.” So he headed back out west.
Then most of his new life he lived off the sheep’s back, not as a farmer but as a wool buyer. So did most of the other “boys”, as they called themselves, and who'd all come out on the same boat, sailing into Fremantle from Europe.
Yossel said that he got out of the D.P. camp by overturning tables. “I knew that the only way I’d cut through the red tape was to be a troublemaker. I walked into the office accused them of asking more questions than the Gestapo and started overturning desks.” A week later his papers were settled.
Sender said, “In the 50’s lots of farms still weren’t hooked up to state electricity. On our honeymoon Rae and me drove down to Yallingup. On the way down I saw piles of big batteries lying around in the paddocks by the side of the road. It was the Suez Crisis, and the price of lead had gone through the roof. The cockees were just glad to get rid of them.”
My father said, “So did the wool. Factories in Europe couldn’t get enough of it. But the crisis ended quickly, much more than they’d counted on and the bottom fell out of the wool market. I was newly wed and with a baby on the way. So I bought a truck with a freezer and went outback shooting roos. In those days we didn’t sleep in hotel rooms.”
“I hated the country and I hated the hotels,” said Max. “I was only too happy to quit when I could.” The funny thing was that Max was the only one in this bunch of crusty little poilisher wool buyers who hadn’t adopted an Australian nickname for work.

Another time Max came to visit alone. He would have been my father's closest friend over the years. My father changed chairs, wheeling his walking frame around between the sofa and armchairs. “Max, I’m riddled with cancer, I know it. I can feel it.” At first Max just looked at him disappointedly. I bore witness to this scene. Maybe it was for my benefit.
Then Max spoke, softly, insistently, with authority. Max had lost his first wife to cancer. He told my father, “Jacob you’ve got to be positive. You’ve just got to think positive, you’re going to survive. You survived the Germans. You’re going survive this too.”
But Dad didn’t say anything more. He looked disappointed. He looked over at me silently, insinuating an unspoken craving for something more direct, something more like the plain hard working mans’ notion of integrity. I couldn’t say anything. Max didn’t either. They changed the subject.

My sister had sent me a copy of Kubler-Ross’s book on dying by express mail all the way from Sydney and reading it simply jelled all the intuitive gut feelings I’d brought out with me from as far away as Israel, about coping with death. I had expected my mother to say that talking about looming death with a dying man was either against Jewish lore or custom. “It’ll make him lose hope,” she persisted. She both surprised me and she didn’t.
“I want you to promise me.”
But I refused.
It was fine for me I knew. In another few weeks I’d be flying home and she’d still be here with him, alone and vulnerable.
I conceded that I wouldn’t act on any unilateral decision.

The Silver Chain car rolled into the driveway. Dad was lying on the couch in the lounge room as usual. The nurse’s name was Janet. She was the coordinator in the Silver Chain palliative care team. I noticed Jacob’s eyes light up when she visited. I noticed her sunny aspect and her bobbed salt and pepper hair tucked behind her ears like a retired tennis pro. It lent her an air of mature sexiness. That would be hard on Mum. But Janet didn’t have 46 years of baggage to carry round, at least not with him.
“How are you feeling love?”
“Not so hot.”
She didn’t have to promise anything. “Its hard for you dear isn’t it?” she said.
“I can’t understand why they didn’t give me a biopsy.”
“Well love you know you have cancer.”
“Yes Dr Broome said that they won’t do the nuclear medicine yet, because it will spread the cancer. Maybe when it settles down?” He was deaf and weak and sought her tone of authority. “But I don’t understand, why not a biopsy?”
She kneeled by the couch and held his hand. “You know love,” she said, “that the doctors think that might be too dangerous.” And if it weren’t for the professional compassion she’d have sounded like one of those saleswomen at Coles. He left it at that. His courage would only take him so far.
Both Mum and I had witnessed that session.
After that Mum offered Janet some coffee. Meanwhile Dad had dosed off. “Its real coffee,” she promised. Janet was only too happy to take up the offer.
With the three of us sitting round the kitchen table Janet asked, “Tell me about Jacob.”
“He’s told everyone his story over and over,” said Mum.
But I knew only too well what Janet was digging at.
“Well he’s kind of tough, maybe rough,” I said. “He’s frank, bluff, gruff… candid.”
“A forthright man?” suggested Janet.
“That’s about it,” I said.
I was chewing on a biscuit and washed it down with percolated coffee. Then I decided to take the risk of offending my mother. “What do you think?” I asked Janet, “Do you think we should talk openly about the big C word and the process of dying?”
Mum didn’t burst out. I was a bit surprised. She even looked relieved.
“You can’t force it,” Janet said to me. It wasn't really what I'd wanted to hear. “You know you have to go at their pace. They’ll let you know when they’re ready.”
Sure she was right I had to admit. Still we were managing to push things pretty far in the right direction.
“Janet I want to talk to you about not prescribing medicines with codeine in them.” That was Mum’s response.
But I felt effective and grateful. Still I knew I wouldn’t have come even this far without the support of the Silver Chain and my sister.

She flew in from Sydney too with her husband and kids, after I’d been alone with my parents for a couple of weeks. It was good for my parents to have nearly all the family around them. Only mine was missing. But we live so far away it didn't feel like their absence was really regretted.
Now that my sister was home, Mum even agreed to the three of us meeting with a counsellor from the palliative care team. My brother in law took care of the kids, which left lots of time free for me and my sister to be together and between the two of us we could talk about just about everything, even stuff like our stakes after Mum’s death. I hoped that this meeting with the counsellor would be the route to closure between Dad and Mum. But more than that it was a chance for my sister to open up various topics about how Mum would manage her life once dad had died and she was alone. The counsellor had to mediate somewhat. It wasn’t easy for Mum to see the difference between intervention and sharing responsibility.

The day before my sister left Dad went into hospital to get a blood transfusion. It was from there that my sister and her family made their farewells before heading home. I went and hid in the hospital corridor. When they’d gone I could see that my father was uncharacteristically emotional. He wiped a lone tear from his fault ravaged cheek. “Did you see that? She cried,” he said. “She’s a good girl. It’s because of the cancer.”
I took that for a sign. I decided to engage my father. It had always been me who had held some sort of begrudging sway over him. I knew that once both I and my sister would be out of the picture, there would be no more progress made. And I knew that not only would no more progress be made, but left to their own devices, things between my parents would only regress to the regular and familiar pattern of denial. A few days later I told him, “Come and sit down. I told you that we’d have to have a little talk.” I opened a bottle of Black Label that I'd bought on their account. The cap resisted. It opened with a snap in my fist, scratching it, instead of opening in a series of neat little pops.
I said to Jacob, “When you saw your father for the last time it was at the train station and you were running away from the Germans. Right now, this might be our last chance to speak. I’m going home soon. And this may be the time to say a few things to each other.” My father looked into his glass, a bit too intently. “What did you say? My hearing aid…” He tapped it on the table.
“Maybe you should put it in,” I suggested, with a twist of passive aggression.
“No it’s buzzing again.”
We both sipped at our whiskeys. I sucked the dry taste from a cracked ice cube. Dad swallowed as if his tongue had turned into a cockee’s. I spied Mum eavesdropping from the kitchen. I tried the direct approach. I asked him if he had any preferences about where he ought to be buried.
Jacob said, “When you’re dead you’re dead. Do what’s best for you. Your sister wants the graves to be near her. Fair enough.”
Then I asked him if he had any ideas about what he would like to have written on his gravestone.
“Nope,” he said.
I asked him what customs he would like us keep for him after he’d died or what rituals he’d like us to observe.
He answered, “Do what’s best for you, it’s up to you. When you’re dead you’re dead.”
My creativity was spent and I gave up, frustrated. His resistance had done it's bit once again. I could send the book back to my sister.

A year and a half later, Jacob was buried in Sydney.
At the cemetery a young rabbi presided. I made quite an impression on him by making reference to the enigmatic biblical Jacob, the sage supposedly characterised by the quality of truth, in spite of his topsy-turvy life. At the time something in the comparison rang true. But it was more than a year later that I realised that Jacob the Patriarch had been so scarred and bruised by life that when in Egypt, sensing death approaching he gathered his sons to his bedside to bequeath them his parting blessings, and half of them had come out as curses.
The night before the funeral I kept waking up. “Where are my friends?” the shadows on the ceiling seemed to ask. Eventually I gave in to the insomnia; I didn’t want to drink too much. It took a while, but I eventually admitted to myself that I was scared that even here, in the spare room in my sister’s house in Sydney, my father’s ghost might be lingering. I felt exposed to anger. “Why are there only strangers come to see me off?”
It was then and there that I decided that contrary to custom, at my father’s funeral, the son would deliver a hesped. It felt like making the final submission in my father’s defence, up before god.
I had done it acting upon intuition, but with the passing of time I came to realise the reason behind the madness, that contrary to common belief and “On Golden Pond”, that with a parent's death it’s the child that has to forgive the parent and not the reverse, as much as in infancy it’s the parent's job to forgive the child.

In Perth at the bowling club everyone had stood in a minute’s silence.