My Dad was my hero.

​

He’d never been admitted to hospital, ‘admitted’ being the fine print to his boast. He refused to count the time the ambulance delivered him to the emergency department in the middle of the night, doubled over in pain, his blue-checked pyjamas soaked through with sweat. He lay on a gurney for hours without anyone checking on him, let alone making an admission of any kind.

 

That was the first time I’d had to step up and deal with something serious. Calling triple zero was the single scariest thing I’d ever done in all my thirteen years—although I can’t remember the ambos arriving. What I do remember is: Dad was dying. My indestructible, indomitable Dad was going to die.

​

I wasn’t allowed to go with him, couldn’t leave my sister on her own—or wake her.

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‘No sense worrying her too,’ Dad said.

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How could she sleep through Dad dying?

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I’d woken up. I’d sensed something was wrong.

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I couldn’t sleep a wink for worrying. I needed Mum, but Dad had insisted I shouldn’t call her. ‘Let’s not worry her,’ he’d gasped, his face etched with excruciating pain.

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I experienced my own world of pain that night—a bewildering mix of fear, responsibility and gratitude. I had to handle this on my own. Dad trusted me to manage this impossible sequence of events. My sister slept through the whole episode; my Mum was in blissful ignorance hundreds of kilometres away.

​

Dad caught a taxi back home five torturously long hours later. He looked wrung out and a grey shade of yellow, but the pain had eased, and he settled off to sleep. I slid back into my bed and took cold comfort from the thick pink and blue striped flannelette sheets, as my eyes did laps of the cornice. I couldn’t fall asleep. I couldn’t be asleep when Dad died.

​

His snoring was music to my ears.

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Next morning he drove himself to the GP and learnt about kidney stones.

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‘Not life-threatening—won’t kill me!’ he’d announced with glee and gusto.

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I was glad I hadn’t called Mum—hadn’t worried her. Dad was right as usual—and nothing could kill my Dad.

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‘That was a big sigh,’ Dad said, as I finally exhaled the toxic gas desperate to escape my lungs. I’d been holding my breath for twelve hours.

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Blotches blurred my vision as the room went black and swirly.

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I felt quite interesting being a fainter, and an ambulance caller. Although I wouldn’t choose to experience either again. Dad looked after me that day—toast and vegemite and a hot milo in front of the tele.

​

Up until that point in time, kidney stones aside, the worst thing Dad ever had was a cold—and the only time he ever whinged was when he had a cold. The main issue being that he couldn’t get on with all his jobs when he had a bleeding cold. A ‘man cold’ to quote Mum. 

‘Men get much sicker when they have a cold than women do,’ Mum would say with a wink as Dad coughed and sneezed his way on to the Richter scale. ‘Man colds are terribly hard to endure.’ I might have been a kid, but I knew Mum meant hard for us to endure.

I loved Dad’s sneezes. They were hysterical. Big, dramatic and funny. He sneezed as though he was executing the single most enjoyable, emphatic performance of human expression possible—and no two were ever the same. Dad made the most of everything, even the humble sneeze.

​

Other than those small niggles, they didn’t bug each other, my Mum and Dad. My school friends regularly moaned about their parents: how embarrassing they were, that they fought all the time, that they hated each other.

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‘Why don’t they get divorced if they hate each other so much?’ they’d complain.

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But I couldn’t think of a single bad thing to say about my parents when I was a kid—I really liked them. And even if I could think it, I wouldn’t have dreamt of saying it out loud. Certainly not to my friends. My parents adored each other. Nothing could tear them apart. My marriage would be exactly like theirs, or no marriage at all. No second best. I’d rather be on my own than be like my friends’ parents. I’d be fine on my own if I had to be. I’d be an enigmatic spinster writer if it came to that. I’d embrace the word. The ‘ster’ words were fun. Spin-ster. Hip-ster. Pun-ster. If I didn’t find my soul mate, like Mum had, I’d be a hipster, punster, spinster. 

 

We were out for a run on an icy, foggy Glasgow morning—about to tackle a tricky incline—when my sister told me. She’d flown home from Melbourne the day before, with a golden tan from three weeks at Point Lonsdale with Mum and Dad. They’d decided not to tell me over the phone, to wait—for her to break the news in person, about Dad’s mini-strokes. We kept jogging. It wasn’t serious. No one was in a panic. Dad was okay. Of course he was.

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The seizure marked the turning point.

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‘An inoperable, incurable brain tumour,’ was the first instalment.

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‘Tell the girls to come home,’ followed quickly. A direct quote from the surgeon.

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That was an improvement—it was operable.

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We flew all night, then a Gull bus, then a taxi.

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Dad was sitting on the end of his bed, defeat on his face. A look I’d never seen before and one that didn’t linger. In a split second he’d replaced it with a smile—and his usual optimism. My Dad. The strongest, most optimistic pessimist on the planet.

​

Medical lingo slipped off my tongue. The surgeon debulked the tumour by eighty percent. Within three months his MRI was all clear. Chemo had done the trick. 

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Nothing could kill my Dad. He said Mum’s mince, vegies and mashed potatoes were what saved him—from the hospital food, from the nausea and from the tumour! That seemed a stretch, but I knew he meant Mum’s love got him through. That he wasn’t going to up and die with so much to live for.

​

Dad’s oncologist owned a holiday house in Point Lonsdale. Check-ups went from every twelve weeks, to every six months—to a coffee once a year at their favourite café by the beach. After five annual reunions, as Dad called them, he was told to be in touch if anything was worrying him. That there was no need to make further appointments otherwise. 

‘You’re my best success story Brian!’ he’d said.

​

We all puffed out our chests at that. Dad was a medical miracle! And as the years flew by we felt like we’d made the whole thing up. Tumour was just a word that rhymed with humour.

 

We hadn’t heard him all those years ago—heard him say that if it came back there would be no treatment. No cure. We hadn’t heard because it was unthinkable. Dad was invincible, Dad beat cancer, Dad would never leave us. But there was too much medical evidence to ignore.

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A dark shadow. The brain tumour was back.

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It was time to step up.

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I helped lower Dad out of the hoist and back into bed after his fifth toilet trip in as many hours.

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‘You couldn’t keep this up forever,’ he said. Exasperated. 

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‘It won’t be forever,’ I said. Devastated.

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Oh God. Had I really said that? It just came out. I couldn’t take it back.

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I slipped back under the doona in the single bed in the spare room.

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I couldn’t fall asleep. I couldn’t be asleep when Dad died.

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His snoring was music to my ears.