When I returned to Australia, my role as Good Daughter continued without significant incident or interruption: the French interlude had bought me an extended line of credit. Two years later, my father was diagnosed with bowel cancer and given a fairly optimistic diagnosis subject to an operation.
I took the news calmly. I soothed my mother’s anxiety and worst fears, downplaying the crisis, making reassuring noises and telling her I would be there to support her.
We agreed that I would come just in time for the operation. In planning mode, I prepared a mental script for how this episode would play out. I would arrive early on the morning of the day my father was to have the operation to remove a tumour from his bowel, have a cup of tea with my mother and then go to the hospital with her to see my father before he went into surgery, to reassure him all would be well.
I intended to stay for two weeks, to make barely a dent in my work schedule, and to allow me, for the week leading up to the op, the long-planned treat of a holiday with David and friends at the Adelaide Festival.
I am, after all, my father’s daughter and have taken responsibility for our group’s logistics: I’ve arranged our accommodation, restaurant bookings and tickets to shows. I want to honour their trust and am already relishing the pleasure of how the components of the week fit into a seamless jigsaw.
I’ve also inherited my father’s love of anticipation, the way it stretches an occasion’s pleasure so that it begins weeks or even months earlier. Even though I try to live more in the present than in the future, there are times when having something to look forward to makes everything worthwhile. I love finessing the smallest details to make sure things go smoothly. I may have adapted his high-stress modus operandi over a more relaxed and flexible style, but it’s still a responsibility I prefer not to delegate.
The Fleurieu Peninsula is a part of the world where I could imagine living. Its plentiful produce—almonds, olives, cherries—reminds me of Provence. Now I will get the chance to introduce friends to a part of the world they don’t know and discover it again through their eyes. This way, I can have my cake and eat it too. Go to the festival and then leave for London. Win win.
But my plans do not go to plan. Three days before we are due to go to Adelaide, my mother calls to say that the hospital can take my father early: he’s going to have surgery in two days’ time. She is relieved because it saves her another week of anxiety, which has already dominated her life for two months since the diagnosis and because she’ll get a better quality of nursing if they can avoid the Easter holiday period, when some permanent staff are bound to take leave and be replaced by agency personnel.
I am crestfallen. I can’t fulfil my role as dutiful daughter. I won’t be there when my father wakes up or to hold my mother’s hand as she waits nervously for a call from the hospital to say everything is alright. When I give her the choice between me arriving for the op or when my father is home convalescing, where he will no doubt be a dreadful patient, she chooses the former, though friends tell me I might be of more use later. Damn.
She puts my father on the phone.
‘Hello, Baby,’ he says, sounding weary and frail. ‘Can you come now?’ he asks in a voice I do not recognise. Is that fear I am hearing? I don’t recognise it. I hesitate. I make excuses about breaking work contracts, knowing this is something he understands and values. I play the professional card, which is how he likes me to sound. I am not lying: there is a day’s work wedged into the Adelaide trip, but it is one I could pull out of, citing family circumstances, only I don’t want to.
‘Okay,’ he says, caving without argument, ‘just come when you can.’ He is docile with acceptance. Normally he would apply pressure.
I am wrong-footed by his lack of insistence. He can be so manipulative, so scorchingly sarcastic if he wants to make me feel guilty for not jumping to his every command, but now he sounds as if he’s surrendered to his fate. I agonise over my decision. Should I cancel the Adelaide trip? Heavy hearted, I decide to stick to the original plan.
In Adelaide, the temperature is over forty degrees for eight days straight, breaking a record. My eyeballs fry after ten minutes on the street, and the hot northerly wind aggravates the feeling of desert-like dehydration, sapping all energy. But the evenings are balmy and the company is stimulating, warm, funny, clever—the very best combination of people and ideas, all charged by being together and arguing with passion about what we like and don’t like about what we see every day and night: ‘Have you been to see the Aboriginal work at the Gallery?’ ‘I hate the way they’ve hung it.’ ‘Don’t forget the museum collection.’ ‘The Jam Factory has a great multimedia show.’ ‘Let’s go to the Persian Gardens tonight.’ ‘Guess who I bumped into from London?’ ‘Why can’t all shows be an hour long?’
We argue vehemently about Leonard Cohen and a controversial German production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—does the set overpower the acting? What is the live vulture for? And why are the actors so unsexy when the play is drenched in sex? Over an hour-long walk before the heat of the day sets in, powering by the River Torrens, before a communal breakfast where the opinions are fuelled by feast-like spreads, we never stop asking each other, challenging, interpreting, speculating. It’s heady, intoxicating and fun, a real mental work-out based on trust, respect and relentless, avid curiosity. I feel energised by the group’s enthusiasm.
One morning I step away from the pack as we are walking by the river to call my mother on my mobile. The operation went well, they seem to have got all of the tumour: ‘The size of a tangerine,’ she tells me, always one for a graphic medical detail. She sounds relieved and upbeat, perhaps charged with adrenalin, proud of having got through it on her own. She took a taxi from the hospital, something she hates to do as she often cannot understand drivers’ accents and worries about not giving the correct tip. She likes the surgeon, the nurses, she remembers their names and feels my father is in capable hands. He’s still very dopey. Now she can get some rest. She says the hospital is more cheerful than she expected, with lots of art on the walls, and that soon my father will have a phone by his bedside so I can call him.
Relieved, I catch up with the rest of the clan. The next few days are golden, burnished in my memory. In a matter of days, their recollection will help keep me sane: I will cling to snatches of remembered conversation as if my life depended on it.
For now, I am in a state of ignorance. I assume that it’s possible to give my mother the support she needs at the end of the phone, like a general talking from a remote vantage point to the troops on the front line. Those few minutes first thing in the morning are neatly stowed away, the time difference adding to the convenience of being able to move on swiftly to more hedonistic plans without a guilty conscience. After all, the operation was a success, the worst is over, it is all for the best. My father has the constitution of an ox and a steely will. He is not ready to go and has come through.
When my mother starts to sound rattled by my father’s post-op behaviour, I am not perturbed and try to downplay her concerns. She tells me that he is ranting, and has become very agitated and abusive towards the nurses, has not slept all night, has wandered the ward disrupting the sleep of other patients. I reassure her that it is simply the after-effects of the anaesthetic, which we have been warned could take up to a week to wear off. She agrees that the nurses have ventured the same opinion, but she is the one who is getting calls in the middle of the night from my father insisting that she come and get him immediately, bringing lots of money, as he is about to be sold or killed by an unnamed enemy. A day later, she is not amused when he calls her by the name of a woman she knows has been his mistress. She says the nurses are pretty fed up with him, as he has kept the ward awake all night with his ravings. I tell her to just hang on, stay calm, not react and that I will be there soon. She sounds unconvinced.
I know the real ordeal for her will begin when he comes home and starts bossing us around, refusing to follow medical advice and unwilling to adopt new recommendations on diet, exercise or safeguarding his well-being. He has been a bitter, angry, disappointed man for a long, long time and that is not going to change. He has also shown a stubborn disregard for his physical self, as if he and his body were entirely disconnected. The cancer scare will have taught him nothing, the reprieve he has gained will not alter his perspective. I have suspected him of suffering from clinical depression for some time, and urged my mother to get him some help, but she has been more preoccupied with his physical symptoms of high blood pressure, general bad temper and forgetfulness to pay attention to a problem she does not fully recognise or understand.
All this is the backdrop to our conversations, during which I try to maintain the voice of a supportive, sympathetic but slightly detached counsellor in an attempt to calm my mother’s rising alarm. Do I sound condescending? Bossy? Probably.
If I were there in person there is not much more I could do, I tell myself, but really, who am I kidding? The difference is she would not be walking into and out of the ward on her own with her emotions in tatters. She would not be coming home alone to an empty flat where there is no one to make her the all-consoling cup of tea and to help her debrief and unload, to cook her some dinner when she is too tired to make it for herself, and to chivvy her into watching something distracting on television. I am a bad daughter because I am not there, my heart hardened by my selfish priorities; any arguments I might offer to the contrary are self-serving.
Nagging at my innards is my biggest fear: what if I don’t love him enough to take care of him? I know that I have limited patience at the best of times, but the history of conflict with my father is so complex and protracted and I have felt so little real love for him for some time that I think it might make me an unsuitable carer. I am afraid of that showing, afraid of the ugliness I feel it betrays in my soul, ashamed of feeling so little generosity in my heart.
I unburden myself to my friend Sean, who recently spent time by his father’s side during his final weeks after a lifetime of virtual estrangement far more extreme than mine. In the end, he says, you forget about all that stuff, all the resentment, the grievances, the wrongs and hurts, and you just see a sick old man. You can’t feel any anger towards someone who is as helpless as a child. Prophetic, wise words that I mull over on the flight to London, guilt-ridden for not going sooner to my mother’s side.