Requiem

Roland Allen Harvey

1929 - 2013
"Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will."
(from 'Requiem' by R.L.Stevenson)

On a Monday morning 10 years ago today, in a quiet light-filled room in Noosa Hospital my dear husband took his last breath. It was just a gentle inhaling, nothing dramatic, made easier, I suppose, by the morphine meant (officially) to minimise his pain. He simply inhaled. And then he didn't exhale. That was all.

I looked up through the window to see, beyond a covered walkway, a pretty little grove of young ti-trees in an internal garden of the hospital. I'd sat there many times on previous hospitalisations that had ended less sadly. Just at that moment, two of our children came down that walkway. They'd driven up from the city as soon as I'd rung, coming to say their goodbyes. I like to think he waited as long as he could, and let go only once the kids were near enough to give me some comfort. 

We all sat with him for quite a while. Some Mozart played softly - his favourite composer. I don't remember any of us crying too much. By then it was as much relief as loss. It had been a long, slow road - but an inevitable outcome with dementia. And really, we'd been luckier than many. He always knew us, lived at home till his last few days and could call on plenty of memories even as it became more and more difficult to express them.

Allen had squeezed into his 83 years several lives - including three families he'd created with three different women, all of us eventually becoming and remaining friends. In fact, I don't know anyone who had an unkind word to say about him. And no one whom he disliked enough to do more than make the subject of an amusing story. He had three young adult sons when I met him. But less than a year later, one of them died in a tragic accident. On the day of that funeral, we made a commitment to live the rest of our lives together. Life's too short to hold back, we decided. 

By the time I met him, Allen had made a living for more than 30 years as a stage manager and then theatre director, working and touring Australia and New Zealand at a time when a life in theatre was an even more precarious profession than it is now. But he redefined himself to follow me around wherever I might work - first becoming an ABC scriptwriter and all-round theatre jobber (actor, director, playwright, theatre manager) in Tasmania, then moving into arts management with the Australian National Choral Association and other groups in Queensland. Coming with me to London on a Fellowship year in the 1990s was an easier assignment - even if the Welsh Choir he accompanied on a European tour (a group destined to travel to Australia the following year) caused a bit of a stir and no end of paperwork when one of the elderly choristers expired while crossing the Channel. 

When I started doing overseas consultancy work on development projects, Allen confidently ran our various households, not only in Queensland but also in the Philippines and Laos for several years each and sometimes from hotel rooms for months at a time. His letters to friends and the stories he wrote about some of his own experiences in these places never failed to amuse - for example, one about a colonoscopy he had in a Manila hospital while lying on a guerney whose wheels kept failing to lock in place. He also had two hospitalisations in Thailand while we lived in Laos, quite enjoying being fussed over by caring nurses and always coming away with great stories. 

He would accompany me on visits to remote areas in these countries - saying he felt like Prince Philip walking behind the Queen (and sometimes making the kind of indelicate observations that Philip was known for). He once agreed somewhat reluctantly to go along to a cock fight in one place we were visiting because he didn't like to upset my driver who felt that that Allen deserved a break from following me around to meetings. He sometimes took on voluntary work while overseas - helping students at an international school to make a film, or visiting potential suppliers of learning materials to help me evaluate their products and manufacturing processes. All that practical stage management experience came in handy when assessing the quality of different plywoods, for example, to make 2000 boxes that could safely take classroom materials out to remote school sites! 

On our return to Australia after one of my assignments, we visited a specialist, thinking Allen may have had a small stroke. But brain scans resulted in a different diagnosis: Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), a relatively rare form of dementia. One of Allen's first reactions after some of PPA's early effects were explained to us was to turn to me with a mischievous look I knew too well. "See, it wasn't my fault that I stuffed up the chequebook account, forgot to pay the electricity bill and can't tell left from right!" Our peripatetic lifestyle was now over. We would have to learn to live with dementia. 

And I think we did it very well in the years we had left. How we dealt with it, how it dealt with us and what I learned through it all - that's what I set out to share when I began this blog in August 2009. In 2010, Allen was even a guest presenter at the National Conference of the Australian Aphasia Association in Sydney. His progressive form of this brain disorder was not well known even to most of the speech and occupational therapists who made up most of the audience. By then he could barely string words together coherently in casual speech, but he could still write himself a script and read from it almost perfectly - due in part to different areas of his brain being differently affected, but also to all those years of theatre experience! My only task as his assistant was to show the slides that he'd selected to accompany his story (My Life in the Theatre...and Afterwards).

Learning to live meaningfully without Allen has been much harder for me than being his caregiver was in his final years. But even though he's not here to share the rest of my life, I'll be better able to deal with whatever life throws at me because of what I learned from how he lived his.