The call that says Dad is dying

I was standing in the cereal aisle at the Coles in Mosman when my sister rang. It was 4:47pm on a Wednesday. I remember the cereal because for about four minutes after I ended the call I just stood there reading the back of a Weet-Bix box, holding the phone, unable to move my feet. Mum had said the words "they think it's days, not weeks" and my legs had gone somewhere that wasn't with the rest of me.

The first thing that goes is your hearing. Not literally. You hear, but in fragments, like the audio is dropping in and out of a bad video call. I caught "palliative team", "morphine driver", "be here by tomorrow", and then a long silence where my sister was crying and I was not, and the freezer hum at the end of aisle six was the loudest thing in Australia.

What the body does

If nobody has ever explained what your body does in the first ten minutes of a call like this, here is what to expect, near as I can describe it from being on the other end of two of them.

• Cold hands. Genuinely cold. Your blood pulls in toward the trunk because the lizard part of you thinks something needs running from.
• Audio dropouts. You will miss every second sentence. Ask the person to repeat and write the key facts on whatever paper is nearest.
• Tunnel vision. The supermarket gets narrower. Faces blur. The fluorescent lights start to feel like they are humming inside your skull.
• A strange politeness. You will say "okay, okay, okay" a lot. You will thank the person who is telling you this thing. The brain reaches for the script it has, which in Australia is mostly please-and-thank-you.
• The delayed gut. The crying often does not arrive at the call. It arrives twenty minutes later, in the car, with the keys in your hand and the ignition not turned.

This is normal. It is not weakness, and it is not denial. It is just the freight train of the news arriving slightly behind the news itself. Like watching lightning and then waiting for the thunder. You can already see the storm. You just have not heard it yet.

The first phone calls you have to make

You are now the centre of a small, urgent communications network and you do not feel like the centre of anything. There is a short list of people you have to ring within the next two hours. Make the list before you start ringing, because once you start, you will forget who you have told.

• Your wife or partner. First call. Not because they are owed it most (though they are) but because you need somebody to be the second brain on your logistics for the next twenty-four hours. You are not going to be able to remember whether you packed underwear.
• Your boss or your direct report. Short, factual, no apology required. "My father is dying. I'm flying to Adelaide tonight. I'll be out at least a week. I'll send a proper handover by Friday." That is the entire script. They will say the right thing or they will not, but it does not matter, because you are leaving.
• Your kids' school, if you have school-age kids. One line. They will be off the routine for a bit; the school just needs to know.
• The sibling or family member coordinating at the hospice end. Confirm who is there now, who is on the way, what time you'll arrive, where you should go when you land. Do not try to coordinate the whole thing yourself from a Coles car park. Pick the family member who is calmest at the bedside and let them be the operations centre.

That is the call list for the first two hours. Everybody else (cousins, mates, the neighbour, your accountant) can wait until tomorrow or the next day.

Booking the plane

If you live in a different city to your dying parent in Australia, the plane part is its own small ordeal and worth thinking about clearly for one minute even though one minute of clarity is roughly all you have got.

• Book the next flight you can physically make. Not the cheap one in the morning. The next one. Qantas and Virgin both have compassionate fares; you can ask, but do not let the conversation about the fare delay the booking by even five minutes. Pay full price if you have to and chase the refund later.
• One bag, carry-on. You are not going on a holiday. You need three changes of clothes, a charger, your laptop if you must, your medication, a book you will not read, and a pair of shoes you can stand in for hours.
• Tell the airline at the desk that you are travelling to a dying family member. They will not upgrade you. They will sometimes move you to an aisle so you can get up. They will be quietly kind in a way that Australian frontline staff are quietly good at.
• Eat something at the airport. Not because you are hungry. Because you have not eaten and you have a long night ahead and grief on an empty stomach turns into something nastier than it needs to be.

I flew to Adelaide that night on the 8:15pm. I did not sleep. I sat by the window with my forehead on the cold plastic and watched the lights of the southern coast go past and tried to rehearse what I was going to say when I walked into the room. None of what I rehearsed was what I said. I said "Hi Dad." He was past words by then. He squeezed my hand.

The instruction every hospice nurse gives

Here is the one thing I want you to remember if you only remember one thing from this piece.

Every palliative care nurse I have ever spoken to, in the public hospice in Adelaide and in the private one in Sydney, says the same sentence in slightly different words. "Go now. Do not wait. We cannot tell you how long you have, and the people who wait until tomorrow morning often arrive in the afternoon."

They say it because it is true and because they have watched a thousand families do the maths wrong. The maths goes like this. You think you have time. You decide to fly tomorrow because the morning flight is cheaper and you've got that meeting and you can leave straight from work. The morning comes and your sister rings and you hear it in her voice before she says the words.

Do not do that maths. Catch the NEXT plane. Sit in the bedside chair for one extra night that ends up being unnecessary, in a hospice where the corridor smells of disinfectant and the tea trolley creaks past at 6am and your father is asleep and nothing is happening. Sit there anyway. The unnecessary night is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy.

If you cannot get there in time (and sometimes the geography just does not allow it: regional Australia, kids you cannot leave, a flight that does not exist until tomorrow morning), the hospice nurse will hold the phone to your dad's ear and you will say what you need to say. He will hear it. Whether or not he can respond, hearing is the last sense to go. They have told me this so many times in so many different rooms that I now believe it the way I believe in gravity.

The conversation with your wife when you get home

This is the part nobody talks about, so I will. After you fly back from the death (because in this scenario you will fly back, and you will fly back as a different person, with your father's watch in a small ziplock bag and a folder of documents you have not yet looked at), there is a conversation you need to have with your partner that night, not in a week, not when you've "processed", that night, even if it's two in the morning.

It goes something like this. "I do not know who I am for the next few months. I do not know how I will be. I will probably be quiet. I might be angry at you for things that are not your fault. I will need you to keep things normal for the kids and I will need you not to ask me how I am every day, because the answer is I do not know. Please just be in the room. That is what I need."

Say a version of that. The exact words do not matter. What matters is that she knows the rules of the next six months before the next six months start, because if you do not tell her, she will read your silence as withdrawal, and you will read her concern as pressure, and a thing that should bring you closer will quietly do the opposite.

My wife and I had this conversation badly the first time and slightly better the second. The slightly better second time saved the marriage, near as I can tell.

A short list of things that helped, and one that did not

• The mate who rang on day three and said "I'm not going to ask how you are. I'm going to be at your place at six with two beers and we'll sit on the back step." He came. We sat. He left at seven. That was the best hour of that week.
• Writing two pages a night for the first ten nights. Not for posterity. Just the body of the day, what was said, what the room smelled like. I have not read them since. I do not need to. The act of writing was the medicine.
• The walk. Same loop, every morning, before the house was awake. Forty minutes. The body needs to know the day has started before the head does.
• What did not help. Trying to be useful at work in the second week. The work was a way of not being in my own life. It looked like coping. It was hiding.

The hospice nurse was right. Catch the next plane. The freezer hum in aisle six will let you go eventually, but only after your feet remember they are still attached to your legs.

Sit. Then go.