If you loved me, you wouldn’t leave me, Dad said. But I had no choice

My father walked slowly down the stairs and stopped. My friends and I, a group of university students in our 20s, sat blearily around the dining room table on a Saturday morning. Caught in the fog of the Friday night before, we had not really noticed his descent into the room. It was the stillness that made me look up. He stood, one hand on the bannister, the other covering his face, and started crying.

He told us through choked sobs that the wooden drawers he had spent the last year restoring, that he had applied the last coat of varnish to and left outside to dry overnight, had been stolen. The drawers that belonged to my brother who died by suicide a year earlier.

Much was left unsaid between me and my father. But I know he loved me.

In three decades as an intensive care specialist, of countless meetings with families facing the death of loved ones, this moment remains a defining representation of grief and unspoken love.

Until then my father and I did not talk much of love. Or grief. I did not doubt I was loved by this gentle, funny, intelligent man. A dad who hugged me, put me on his shoulders and swam me out the back of the surf to be with my siblings when I was a boy. We simply did not speak of it. Love by action.

We improved over time, at least he did. In my 30s, he would tell me he loved me as I headed back to Brisbane airport after visiting from whatever Australian city I lived in. A last-minute rushed declaration I did not treat with the tenderness it deserved. I too was hidden in a sea of unexamined grief.

In my 40s it changed again. He had slowly disappeared into dementia, with frequent stays in hospital during the last months of his life. One night the ward nurses called in the early hours because he was distressed and wanted my mother to come and get him. His marriage a love story his fading mind clung to. I went, comfortable in hospitals at night, and safe in my cloak of professional compassion. After an hour of sitting with him while he went from brandishing a walking stick at nurses to settled in bed, confused but calm, I told him I was heading home. He looked at me with his clear blue eyes and said, “if you loved me, you wouldn’t leave me here”.

Credit: Matt Davidson

That barb dug deeper because I had heard it before. In the same hospital, decades earlier, my brother had levelled the same accusation. A week earlier, my parents had received a pre-dawn phone call from the Australian Consulate in France. Donald, who we thought was driving up the east coast of Australia, had been found agitated and hallucinating on the streets of Paris.

I remember sitting in the back of my mother’s car, an 18-year-old medical student next to my 20-year-old brother who was heavily dosed on antipsychotics, as we drove him from Brisbane airport to hospital. He stared at me intently, showed me the skin peeling in chunks from the palms of his hands, and explained his reality. A vivid delusion of the plane catching fire on the tarmac at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, smoke and flames in the cabin, passengers distressed and dying, his hands burning as he tried to help. He shared his indignation and distress at the lack of action by the crew and the cover-up by authorities. Again, I did not know what to say.

This was not the brother I knew. I knew the gifted runner. The image of him crossing the finish line of the middle distance state championship with arms raised in victory an ongoing inspiration as I devoted hours to track training. The talented photographer whose images from major sporting events appeared on magazine and newspaper covers.

We arrived at the hospital perched on a hill above the river. While my mother checked him in, he paced outside the front entrance, asking me when we were going home. After a few minutes, he headed for the river, to retrace a route home he, as a runner, had completed hundreds of times. I followed, stopped him, and led him gently, firmly, back to my mother and the waiting orderlies. He stared at me with his inherited beautiful blue eyes and said, “if you loved me, you wouldn’t leave me here”.

I did not know I was running out of time to tell my father and brother I did love them. Both died soon after those moments, and I continued to learn.

On a recent Father’s Day, as I entered my 50s, I walked along a local river with my son and his partner. As we talked about his upcoming mental health placement as a medical student and watched runners pass by on a background of blue sky reflected on water, the memory of my brother surfaced abruptly. As always, his presence was followed by the old grief that lodged in my chest, and a reflex urge to push down the memories and avoid the distress of the moment.

On this day, I chose instead to talk. They listened.

I told them about Donald, and tried to explain my grief, and unknowingly, my love. How complicated it had felt for so long. How I had feared I was pre-destined to join him in schizophrenia, a disease littered through my male lineage. As I outlived this, how this fear was replaced by the shame that grew from the memory of his despair when I left him at hospital. I didn’t talk about how this was wrapped in the missed opportunities to tell my father I loved him while he could still remember. I told them of my deep sadness at the absence of these men in my life, and the recent and surprising comfort I felt when they appeared in my thoughts.

Then I listened. My son told me it was the most I had ever spoken about Donald, and reinforced my wife’s gentle urging to speak of my grief to the people I love. My son’s partner, a proud young Gunditjmara Keeray Woorrong woman who talks to me of ancestors and connected timelines, described my recognition of the comfort of my brother in my thoughts, the act of sharing this as love that is intentional.

I continue to learn. This Father’s Day I will again try to celebrate my love out loud. For those I have, and those I have lost. An intentional love.

Associate Professor Neil Orford is an intensive care specialist based in Geelong.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.