My Dad would have been 83 years old this week. He died over 3 years ago; five months short of his 80th birthday.
Dad once said to me that he had already lived three score year and ten and that “any more was a bonus”. Using this logic, he had nine bonus years.
The day Dad died, I saw his Ute filled with his rubbish bins pass by my house. I was at the kitchen window. I knew that I could expect him later for a cup of tea and instructions for the care of his place while he was away for a few days. Instead I had the police at the door advising me he had passed away suddenly and was found in his Ute, with his dog at his side parked at the face of the rubbish dump. His doctor had declared him dead from a list of possible old age conditions.
As sad as this was and still is, my thoughts go back to 2009; four and a half years earlier when I thought he would die. Dad had travelled with me to spend a week in a village on a remote island in Vanuatu with my family and our friends that lived there. He became seriously ill on his last day there.
Two nights before our flight off the island was due we were guests of honor at a banquet. I was fussing over him staying up late and he sent me off to bed telling me “I’m a big boy!” Less than twenty-four hours later, Dad was very pale and lay on a rough wooden bed inside the village hut’s guest bedroom. We did not know at the time, but his diabetes had complicated his body’s response to a tropical infection on his lower leg. Never before had I felt so aware of this small village’s isolation from medical care and faced with the possibility that my Dad could die.
My Dad survived this serious infection and enjoyed the attention of private medical care in Port Vila and two Australian public hospitals before his release six weeks later. Getting him there felt like an eternity though, as we painstakingly transported him on a thin mattress in the back of a utility nine kilometres up a steep and windy rain-forest dirt track to the airstrip one hundred and sixty metres above the village. Our luggage, our family, slabs of fresh fish plus many other Ni-Vans joined my Dad on the back of the utility, making the slow journey even slower as we chugged up the mountain in the island’s only vehicle.
Providentially this was our scheduled flight off the island although the only flight due that week. Intravenous insulin, saline solution and an overnight stay in the capital’s whitewashed private hospital cost him one thousand dollars and provided him with the medical release that allowed him to fly home on our scheduled flight the next day and into the care of the Royal Brisbane Hospital.
Not only did Dad survive this trip overseas but my sister and I accompanied him on a two-week guided tour of China, culminating in a visit to the Great Wall. Since that trip to Vanuatu, he struggled with circulation in his affected leg and had also had a stent placed in his heart. Towards the end of the holiday angina had hindered his steps and his feet were swollen. He survived a Chinese foot massage by a skimpily clad masseuse in tiny shorts and enormous heels; and hired a strong man from Tibet to push him in a wheel chair through Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City of Beijing. He did not quite manage to walk the Great Wall but he did step foot on it. Three months later he was gone.
Dad and I had spoken about death some years earlier. He believed that his days were numbered by God. It seems miraculous that he survived his illness in Vanuatu and yet he died doing a chore he routinely did for over 30 years.
As much as I miss him, I take comfort that he too believed as the psalmist did that “…all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” (Psalm 139:16)
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