20 years ago today, I lost someone very close to me. Someone who treated me like a princess, someone who I really didn’t get to know that well. Hit that rewind button on the video machine people!!!
It was a Monday morning on the 8th October 1990, just 16 days after my wedding (a wedding that should never have happened, but it did and well hindsight’s a brilliant thing isn’t it?). It was 9am, I was still in pyjamas and I was watching a recording of the Brisbane Bullets V Eastside Spectres basketball semi final game. I was a proud Brisbane Bullets basketball devotee and my team had just beaten the Victorian team to get into the NBL Grand Final. I was on my honeymoon and my team, who no one gave a hope in hell in winning at all during the year, had made the Grand Final. Yes, I was on Cloud Nine! And then the telephone interrupted my elation ….
It was my sister and all I heard was “Don’t panic, he’s okay”. Apparently the last couple of hours my father had been to hell and back, and I knew nothing about it. I was pathetically celebrating my basketball team’s win whilst my father was lying in an ambulance and then a hospital. Meryl continued to tell me that ‘it was only a minor heart attack…but I think we should call in the family”. Heart attack??? This man walked me down the aisle just two weeks ago and he has had a mild attack?? And then I called my then husband at his work, asked him to come home, pick me up and we go to hospital. (Twenty years later I question myself why did I do that??? Why didn’t I just get into my VW Beetle and get to that hospital in no time. No, I waited and waited and eventually ‘he’ turned up). We got stuck at the intersection of Gympie and Webster Roads. Car in front braked immediately at an amber light, we were prepped to run the red, so we impatiently stewed and stewed and stewed. Eventually we got to Prince Charles and I bolted into that hospital. I had no idea where I was going, I eventually asked a front office girl. All I remember was a very long hallway, it felt like it stretched for miles. But I ran as fast as I could and soon I saw my mother sitting in a chair, next to an office table, by the door. And then I heard her voice … “He’s gone Janelle, he’s gone”. My Dad had died on a cold examination table at the Prince Charles Hospital. For hours I stroked my mother’s hair whilst she sobbed uncontrollably and my sister attempted to locate our siblings and other family members, very tricky thing to do when our family was as apart as it could be.
About an hour later, the time had come, the time to say our goodbyes. I mean how hard could it be? I had seen it many many times, in many many TV soapies. But no, no soapie can pre-warn you on seeing your own father lying lifeless under a sheet on a cold hospital examination table. There’s no laughter from him, there’s no ‘come here kiddo’ being spoken. The silence is horrible, the vision is something I never want to go through again. He lay there motionless, silent, eyes closed, with this horrible looking crappy cotton wool stuffed up his nose and his lips and eyelids all taped up. I was finding it hard to believe that it was my father lying there. Mum kept saying over and over “It’s just a shell Janelle, just a shell, your father has moved on”.
No Mum, he was no shell. This shell was my father. I came into his world when he was just 43yo, according to him and you I was ‘the apple of his eye’. No one had ever died on me. My Dad’s parents died when he was very young. My Mum’s parents died when I was 9 and 13yo, so I really had no idea what it was like to lose a loved one. One of the last memories I have of Dad was at my wedding, he looked so dashing in his white jacket and bow tie and silver hair. Now he was gone. After saying my ‘goodbyes’, we left the examination room and I collapsed into my then husband’s arms, belting the crap out of him and yelled “NO”, over and over and over again … (unfortunately too close to my mother, who still remembers that moment to this day).
Soon we arrived at my parents’ home, where the family slowly congregated to. Sadly I remember no hugs, no comforting, no ‘are you okays?’ I remember the Brisbane City Council attempting to plant a tree on my Father’s manicured perfect lawns, and they were quickly shushed away. I remember one certain brother of mine getting up me for eating something, mind you, I hadn’t even had breakfast but hey, lets pick on the baby sister huh??? And then I remember one by one, each of my siblings leaving. They all had their own families and because I was child-less, I was left to comfort Mum. I was 21yrs old. My parents NEVER cried infront of me, I had never had someone die on my like this, but they volunteered me to look after Mum. She was my Mum, and I was staying. I had to shut down my tears, shut down my grieving but it was for my Mum. But as my siblings slept in their cosy homes, they NEVER encountered the howling, the crying, the distress that came from my mother on that night of 8th October 1990. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep that night at all … (Needless to say, the howling still echoes through my head 20yrs later).
The next day my siblings suggested I write a poem for my Dad’s funeral. I had NEVER been to funeral fullstop. I had no idea what funerals entailed but I composed a poem and I nervously stood at that podium at Albany Creek on the 10th October, shaking like a leave. None of my older siblings would do it, none of them would pay homage to their father, they were too nervous apparently, left it to me … But I stood there, shaking like a leave, with my dead father three metres away from me in his coffin and I read that hastily put together poem and I remembered that Mum loved it, and that was the main thing.
08.10.2010 – 20 years later – I can’t believe it has already been twenty years. I swear the heart ache gets worse as each year passes by, and I know why. After the funeral was held, everything went back to normal, like nothing had happened. I was told very quickly, well just hours after my father’s funeral, by my then-husband to ‘get over it, he’s gone, get on with it’. I was more or less forced to shove all my mourning and grief into a box and throw the box away. I was never allowed to grieve, I never had that family to console me, I just wrapped all that heartbreak up and pretended it never existed. And let me tell you, that heartbreak never stays locked away. The longer you lock that heartache away, the worse the anger and hurt gets. Yes, I’ve tried counselling, but I’m sick of hearing from them professionals that there are millions of people worse off than me, but hello, that doesn’t change my bitterness and heartache doctors.
And what truly shatters my heart is that my two lovely boys will never know what a wonderful gentleman their ‘other’ Grandfather was. Noel Ross would have loved his two grandsons, he would have cuddled them, he would have taken them on many many train rides using his Gold QR Card. But unfortunately my two boys only want to know one grandfather and that truly shatters my heart. No matter how many photos I show them, there is only one Grandad and that kills me. And also, I never got to hear those words that all my other siblings got to hear. When they had their many children, my Dad said one thing to each of his children but me … “Hey look, they’ve got the ROSS nose!” He would proudly say and laugh wildly. Sadly I never got to hear that, sadly my Dad didn’t hang around to see me leave the loser that he told me not to marry. Sadly he didn’t hang around to see me meet and then marry a wonderful man, a man who is addicted to QR like Dad was. And sadly he didn’t see his ‘princess’ give birth to two beautiful boys who will never know or hear their other Grandfather.
Don’t get me wrong. Death happens. Expected or Unexpected. I accept death. What really pisses me off is we now live in the age of digital technology. My two boys have thousands of photos and hours of video coverage if something ever happens to their fraternal grandparents, me or Andrew. What do I have of my Dad??? A video tape of my 1990 wedding where I hear him speak only a couple of times. If I want to hear what my Dad sounds like again, I have to watch my first wedding again. Its like watching a horror movie. I want to set fire to that video tape but I can’t, it’s the only tape recording of my father’s voice :0( Today, I can’t remember how my Dad sounds, I can’t remember his moves, I can’t remember much at all about my Dad, its like he died when I was 2, and not 21. And everyone around me thinks I am so obese because I simply eat too much chocolate and drink too much wine … well when your heart aches as much as mine does, the chocolate and wine help immensely.
So forgive me if I’m not much company on Friday 8th October. Mentally I am back in 1990. I wish I was back in 1990. I wish I cancelled that wedding that should have not happened to see if it made a difference. I will always blame myself for Dad’s death. I was his ‘princess’, I hooked up with his worst nightmare and I married him, and two weeks later, Dad died. Do I feel guilty??? Have a look at me and you decide ….
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