Mum died peacefully at 12.45am Sunday 14th January, a month and two days short of her 66th birthday. We were at her bedside.
She fought the cancer for 8 months, which is 6 more than the specialist thought she’d live when he first saw her. At the end, her illness was well-managed by the tireless staff of Gosford Hospital oncology unit ward M2, and for the final few days she was semi-conscious, sedated with a cocktail of morphine, anti-nausea and various other drugs. The doctor said her stomach was a caked mass of tumours. Systemic failure occurred primarily because she couldn’t eat, and because the chemotherapy they tried after she developed an allergy to the first one also produced a bad reaction. Her immune system being so low, she developed pneumonia and one of the medications was to dry the bubbling secretions in her lungs.
She remained brave, considerate and good-humoured to the end, rallying remarkably over the Christmas period to come out of hospital twice on day leave – once to attend the family Christmas gathering (traditionally held on the 27th – this year for the first time it was in a restaurant: the bistro of a club near Gosford Hospital) and once to attend her father’s funeral, at which she did a splendid job of reading the eulogy. Grandad died around 2.15am on the 26th December after a bad fall a few days earlier. I was at his bedside and had been for most of his time in hospital; more on this in another entry yet to be written. His funeral was on the 29th; after that Mum returned to hospital, and one more dose of lethal chemo initiated the final decline.
Both deaths were slow enough to give the family time to say their farewells. Our thoughts are with Granny, who has lost her husband of 67 years and, 18 days later, her daughter, her firstborn. Mum was born while Grandad was away fighting in WWII, and given his name as her middle name; she and he were alike in many ways, physically and temperamentally. But Grandad was 94, and with that and the longevity of the women in our family, we didn’t expect to lose Mum so young. Our thoughts are also with Dad, who at 76 is frail himself, but who has done a wonderful job of looking after Mum through the months of her illness, shouldering the burden of tasks often unfamiliar to him and rising to every challenge. We will do our best, for him and Granny, to help ease the challenges of this new condition: more visits to Granny and more Sydney visits for Dad, I say.
