Kiwi Konexions: We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of
Glen and Martin Taylor received a phone call in the middle of the night - a call telling them that their beloved daughter is suffering from incurable brain cancer.
Glen shares with us her thoughts at this most terrible of times.
In this family season the thoughts and prayers of Open Writing readers are with the Taylors, mother, father and daughter.
I woke this morning at peace with myself. A traumatic dream, full of complications, heartaches and heartbreaks, had suddenly turned into the most calm, restful and soul restoring end. From the chaos raging around me, I found myself alone on an empty beach. Where I don’t know, but probably the far north of Scotland, my home, looking out at what seemed to be the Lofoten Islands, a place we spent a holiday many years ago when our children were ours and only little, the happy days, the close family days, for as we all know we have to let our children fly.
So my dream changed from trauma and nightmare to peace and I awoke happy and content. But why the dream, why the empty beach which I strolled along, free from stress and worry and why the great cliffs of the Lofotens?
In one of my articles several years ago I wrote about “the flip side of emigration” and I ended the article by saying, “but one day the phone will ring again.” The phone did ring but it was not the call I expected in the middle of the night, this was a very different sort of call. The voice said my beloved daughter had terminal brain cancer and was to be operated on the following day. We had no warning of this, only a few weeks prior she had been with us to share our golden wedding. Her personality had changed but we didn’t know why, now we knew.
Our daughter, who had survived a broken marriage, brought up two children single handed, held down a responsible high-powered job, just completed another degree and was heading for the diplomatic corps and overseas postings when her children left home, was dying. This wasn’t the phone call I was waiting for; another will come in the not too distant future.
And so we boarded the first flight we could get and winged our way across the Tasman. We counted the minutes. “She will be in theatre now.” “Half way through,” for we knew the operation would take six hours and so we counted the time. We landed, rushed by taxi to central Sydney and boarded the bus which would take us to Canberra. “Another two hours and she will be out.” The bus sped across the open barren land of Australia, climbing higher to the capital city. The lights of Canberra began to illuminate the sky. “Nearly there, will she be alive?” The family mascot, the battered old Pooh Bear, was in my hand luggage.
The bus pulled into the terminal and a stranger greeted us, our granddaughter joined her, much taller than me and more mature than when I last saw her. We were rushed to the hospital. Heather was out of theatre and in ICU and able to recognise people. She was not dead, she was not a cabbage, which neither she nor we would have wanted her to be, she was Heather. Her shaven head lay on the pillow, a tube drained blood from it while tubes in her arms poured blood into her, screens bleeped and nurses moved around adjusting this and that. She smiled, her eyes filled with tears, she knew we would come and she clutched Pooh to her.
Over the next ten days I sat beside her hospital bed, moving from ICU to High Dependency. The surgeon talked to us. The tumour was malignant and very large, one of the worst kind. He had only been able to remove 80%, he couldn’t remove it all, only God could do that and he wasn’t God. They planned to give her radiation and chemo therapy. It won’t cure her it will only buy her a very little more time. He was kind but he was honest.
Our daughter returned home and as time passed life took on a sort of normality. Her younger, more able friends, less emotionally involved, come around and we become “the oldies” the washer-uppers and cleaners and we slip into the background. Our daughter worries about losing her hair and I suggested pretty hats for summer and wigs for winter. “A small price to pay for life,” I say as I know she has entered a phase of denial, which is good.
She returns to her old independent self, “don’t need mum” stage, and I clean the bathroom, cook meals, hang out washing and put knife-edge creases into my grandson’s school pants, he leaves school soon and moves out into the real world, to further education and whatever the future might hold. Our granddaughter is away with her father and his new girlfriend and won’t be returning. We wait and watch. We share special times together, we sit on her balcony and stroll by the lake, we talk of this and that, remember old times and laugh at silly jokes, we don’t talk of death.
I see subtle changes as the tumour begins to regrow, forgetting names and days, and the lost frightened look in her eyes. The next part of her journey begins. Drugs and her own strong spirit enable her to live a fairly normal life as her treatment starts and other folk want to come and see her so it is time for us to leave for a little while. It is enough for me that when she was most afraid she said, “don’t leave me mum, just hold my hand.” So that is what I did.
We fly home, leaving her in the hands of more able folk for a little while. But in the not too distant future the phone will ring again and I will return with old Pooh, hopefully to hold her hand once more for a short while.
The one phone call I didn’t expect, but that peaceful awakening on that empty beach has given me the strength I needed to carry on for just a bit longer. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” So forgive me folks if, for a while, we leave our emigrants bobbing off the Otago Heads, waiting to start their new life, as I come to terms with what lies ahead.
