‘We call it a miracle’

A story of love, Hope and a broken heart. By Trent Dalton

Undying love: Hope and Lancelot Hogg on their wedding day in 1949

The email landed two weeks after Hope and Lancelot died. Subject: “Gotta be a story here”. A tip from intrepid Australian travel writer and journalist Glyn May, who still has a nose for a yarn, even in retirement. “Hi Trent, the attached funeral notice caught my eye. If there’s not a story there, I’ll give up. Over to you. Cheers, Glyn.”

We were having dinner the night Gayle Kiepe phoned me back. Thanks for calling, I said. I write for a magazine. “Mmmmm?” she said, puzzled and cautious. A reader was moved by your mum and dad’s funeral notice, I said. “Okaayyyyy?” she said.

I was moved by it, too, I said. It felt like there was a love story spanning a lifetime in that small newspaper notice.

HOGG, Lancelot Thomas OAM

Passed away on 25th October 2016

Aged 90 years.

HOGG, Hope Laurel

Passed away on 26th October 2016

Aged 91 years.

“Mum died 24 hours, less 10 minutes, after Dad died,” Gayle said. It felt to me like Hope Hogg might have died of a broken heart. “Well, yeah,” Gayle said. “A saddened heart. She didn’t want to be without him. It was their undying love.”

But there was something more to it, she said. Gayle went quiet down the phone line. It took me three seconds to realise she was weeping. “We thought…” she said, before breaking off again. “We thought it was a miracle.”

We could begin in Verona, Italy, at the end forJuliet and her Romeo, young lovers who died by broken heart before they died by poison and blade. That’s how old this kind of true love is. But we’ll begin in the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee ­Hospital at Coopers Plains, Brisbane, with Hope Hogg’s swelling ring finger. It was Tuesday night, October 25, the day before Hope died. Doctors said her hands were swelling. Her son, Lawrence Hogg, 63, gently told her that the nursing staff had a tool for removing wedding rings from swollen fingers to relieve pain. “You’re not cutting my rings,” she said. “You leave them alone.” She said she’d wear the pain. She said she’d wear his ring.

Hope and Lancelot were married on May 14, 1949, in the place they met: Greenslopes Baptist Church, in Brisbane’s southern suburbs. They were together seven years before they wed. “We kept company,” was how Hope always put it. In another time and another place, it was a polite and compact way for a woman of deep faith to describe the two-thirds of a decade she spent falling in love with the dashing son of a Greenslopes clothes presser.

Lance was good with numbers, a former RAAF recruit who worked hard to land a senior accountancy job at Troop Harwood & Co, which would later merge into Coopers & Lybrand, which became PricewaterhouseCoopers. Hope was the rock who ran things back at home, marshalling five kids – Gayle, Lawrence, Lorraine, Rhonda and Diane; making cakes and biscuits for church on Sunday; making time, as Lance did, for anyone who needed it, driven by God and faith to help the disadvantaged and the lost; there with open ears and arms for decades.

“I’ve been thinking about Arnott’s Orange Slice biscuits,” says Lorraine Roth, Gayle’s sister, at the table outside the Sunnybank Community and Sports Club bistro. Lawrence is sitting to Lorraine’s right. He remembers the biscuits, too, and the glass of milk waiting for each of Hope Hogg’s ­children every single day they returned from school. Lorraine cries then. Because that’s what true love and grieving does, makes us cry over Arnott’s Orange Slice biscuits.

The biscuits remind them of the family home and pictures on the walls and night-time meals and Hope swinging brooms at misbehaving kids hiding beneath beds and Lance in his office doing hours of voluntary book-keeping for the ­Baptist Church, a lifelong side job for which he’d receive an OAM in 1994. They remember Hope watching her favourite Wild West movies and Hope marvelling, well past 80 years of age, at the action-packed dexterity of her favourite movie star, Jean-Claude Van Damme. Lance liked the softer stuff. His favourite movie was Out of Africa. He had a romantic streak that would reveal itself in ­Valentine’s Day cards and old letters his children would find while packing up their mother’s treasures weeks after her death.

Lawrence breathes deeply, holding back his tears. “You want to hear about the miracle?” he asks. “Please,” I say. “Tell me about the miracle.” No parting of the Red Sea, to be sure, just a small suburban miracle of timing. “God’s timing,” Lawrence says.

Grieving: Gayle Kiepe, one of five siblings

Since 1971, Hope and Lance shared a high-set home in Chadford St, MacGregor, a few streets from the Sunnybank Community and Sports Club. They were blessed with good health. No major operations, just a few skin cancer issues and eye operations for Hope, but they lived independently through old age. “Then Dad had a heart attack in August last year,” Gayle says. Doctors saw signs he’d also endured a “silent heart attack” months earlier.

“He was transferred to Sunnybank Private ­Hospital and the doctor said his heart was only functioning at about 15 per cent. They said he would have more than five weeks to live, but it wouldn’t be years. It would be months.”

“So Mum and Dad made the decision that they would like him to come home,” Lorraine says. “Dad was cared for palliatively at home. I could tell some days Mum was down, when Dad wasn’t having a good day. But there were other days he was good and she made the most of those days with him.”

They were a team, Lance and Hope. Gayle has a photograph of them taken in March last year. Hope’s birthday. I notice how tightly they were holding hands in the photograph; the siblings say they always held hands like that. They were one. One knew what the other was thinking and, when a couple like that nears the end of their story, that beautiful gift of shared knowing brings complexities. Hope could feel her husband’s frustrations towards the end. She could feel her husband’s fears. “She was so protective of him,” Lorraine says. “She watched those carers like a hawk.”

On the morning of Monday, October 24, 2016, Gayle answered a call from her father’s in-home carers. “They said Mum should go to QEII hospital because they thought she had a chest infection,” Gayle says. “She had a bit of a cough. I spoke to Mum on the phone and I said, ‘Maybe you better go, Mum’, and, of course, all she was concerned about was Dad. She said, ‘What about your father?’ and I said, ‘Look, he’ll be fine, Mum. The carers are there 24 hours. If anything happens, I’m sure they’ll alert one of us’. I said, ‘You go off to hospital and I’ll be up first thing in the morning’.”

The following morning, Lorraine answered a phone call from Lance’s carers. Her Dad had passed away peacefully from heart failure. Lance’s children gathered that morning around him. They kissed him on the forehead. They thanked him for being a beautiful father, a beautiful man. They wished him peace. And when the time was right, Lance’s children turned to each other to address the question rattling through their minds: “How are we gonna tell Mum?”

It was Princess Leia who first sprang to mind when I read the notice, she of a hundred million boyhood crushes, including mine. Carrie Fisher died last year and her mum, Debbie Reynolds, died one day later, December 28, 2016, her cause of death determined as a cerebral bleed with hypertension as a contributing factor. “She said, ‘I want to be with Carrie’,” Reynolds’ son Todd Fisher told reporters not far from his mother’s bedside at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles. “And then she was gone.”

Last year, a cardiovascular researcher at The ­University of Sydney, Dr Thomas Buckley, wrote a study on the physiological effects of emotions on the heart. He said bereavement was the most intense stress a person could endure. “Coping with the death of a loved one can be incredibly difficult on an emotional level, and now we can see the physical impact as well.”

“Can we die of a broken heart?” I ask Dr Angela Kucia, senior lecturer in nursing at the University of South Australia and the country’s leading researcher into broken heart syndrome. “Quite often one partner can’t live without the other,” she says. “We have heard stories of people dying of a broken heart, but in the past this has been thought of more as a myth than truth.” Now we have a name for it. “We now know that severe emotional stress can cause a condition known as Takotsubo syndrome, also known as broken heart syndrome, that affects the ability of the heart to pump properly.”

It has the same symptoms as a heart attack, including chest pain and breathlessness. In the early stages, doctors sometimes struggle to ­differentiate heart attack from broken heart ­syndrome. The figures are “fluid”, says Dr Kucia, but current estimates are that for every 100 people who present at hospital with symptoms of heart attack, two will have broken heart syndrome. Loss of one’s true love can certainly cause it, but so can losing one’s home or winning the lottery. “There is no exact explanation for how or why it occurs in some people,” Dr Kucia says. “What we do know is that when the body is stressed, it releases stress hormones into the bloodstream, and these hormones appear to have a role in the development of Takotsubo syndrome.

“The first cases were recognised in Japan in 1990, in older women who had experienced recent bereavement. A lot of progress has been made in recognising the condition since then, and we know that it can occur in anyone – even children – but 90 per cent of reported cases occur in post-menopausal women. We do not know why.”

This is where Carrie Fisher would have said something brilliant about women having bigger hearts, feeling deeper, loving harder. Or maybe just something about finding some beauty in the bad times. “Take your broken heart,” Fisher once said. “Make it into art.”

Hand in hand: Hope and Lancelot, close until the end

Hope Hogg loved deeply and truly. She knew every thought in her children’s minds. She could sense when they weren’t telling her something and she would draw it from them with care and patience. “I thought, ‘How are we going to tell her this?’” says Lorraine. “But she always knew if you were keeping something from her.”

On Tuesday afternoon, October 25, the Hogg siblings consulted Hope’s doctor at QEII hospital. “Mum had picked up by this time,” Gayle says. “A doctor had come in that afternoon and said to us, ‘She’s doing quite well, her blood pressure’s ­looking good.” Gayle and her younger sister, Rhonda, sat by their mother’s bedside. “I held Mum’s hand and we said to her, ‘Mum, Dad passed away this morning. He’s gone’. And she said, ‘Oh, I didn’t get to say goodbye’. And I said, ‘Yes, Mum… Dad would have known that you loved him and that you said goodbye. He would know, Mum. He would know’.”

Everybody who loved her filed into that ­hospital room eventually; children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. She had just lost the love of her life, but she was comforting others, embracing her children, caring for crying grandchildren. “She was grieving and I knew she was,” Gayle says. “But she was still talking to the rest of the family and she was really seeing her kids and she was seeing her grandchildren. She spoke to us all.”

On the table outside the bistro, Lawrence shakes his head. “Then we all left the hospital and went home,” he says. “We were talking about what’s happening tomorrow. We were saying, ‘Oh, she’s come good, she’ll pull through this’.”

“We’d been talking where the best place would be for Mum to go, now she was on her own,” ­Lorraine says. “We were all very optimistic,” ­Lawrence adds. “Then suddenly Gayle’s husband, Ross, rings me on the Wednesday morning: ‘I’m sorry…’” Lawrence’s head sinks. He weeps, takes some deep breaths, shakes away his tears.

“We later found out the cause of death was hypertension and there were cardiac complications as well,” Gayle says. “The doctor had given us such a positive outlook. No one was even imagining on the Wednesday morning that Mum would be gone.” Lawrence nods: “And that’s why I call it a miracle.”

Even without the funeral notice published in The Courier-Mail on October 31, the funeral ­service for Hope and Lancelot Hogg would have filled Annerley Baptist Church to capacity. There wasn’t a seat, or a dry eye, to be found. But the notice moved locals, just as it moved Glyn May when he read it. People were comforted by the love story contained in a couple of inked dates and ages. “They’re famous,” one friend said to Gayle.

Lawrence passes the funeral notice around the table to his sisters. “I’ve thought about that time in ­hospital,” he says. “You can say it’s chance, it’s luck. I don’t believe it. She goes to hospital, she hears Dad’s passed, and 23 hours and 50 minutes later she passes away? There’s no sign of, ‘Hang on, Mum’s not going to be here tomorrow’. And then, ­suddenly, Dad’s gone. And she knows where he’s gone.” Lawrence’s sisters nod and wipe tears from their eyes. “She says, ‘My job’s over. I’m going too. I’ve done my bit. I can go now. I can go where I wanna go’. And she knew where that was – heaven. But you can’t choose when you’re going to die. Did she pray to God? Did she say, ‘It’s over. I’ve run my race. I know Lance is with you now. I want to come and join him’. Did she say that? I believe she was ready to go. Wanted to go. Happy to go. And God took her.”

Lorraine and Gayle nod their heads in assurance. Gayle wipes her eyes and says: “Dad held out his hand and said, ‘Come on, Hope, you come too’.”

The intention of the miracle being, then, ­nothing more or less than love. They got to stay together. It was only for 23 hours and 50 minutes that Hope Hogg had to be without her Lancelot.

Lawrence turns to me, shrugging his shoulders. “That’s the miracle,” he says.

I leave the Hogg siblings talking among ­themselves at the bistro table, swapping stories about their mum and dad, crying and laughing, remembering mostly. I shoot a quick email to Glyn May, thanking him for sending me the funeral notice. I tell him his instincts were correct about the story of Hope and Lancelot Hogg; that it was a small human story about love and loss and broken hearts. Then I ask him a question, just for the hell of it. “Are you lucky enough to love someone so much that you wouldn’t want to live in a world without them in it?”