The Passing of Arch

Arch Harvey was my father in every sense of the word. I am his oldest offspring, but I declined to give any eulogy at his funeral because I would have been unable to deliver it without breaking down into tears, and I didn’t want to make a public spectacle of myself on that solemn occasion. It wouldn’t have been right to allow that to happen. So I suppose that writing this is my way of doing something now which I couldn’t do then.

Following his 79^th birthday, Archie was required to undergo a medical examination to determine his fitness to drive after his 80^th birthday. This examination prompted the medical fraternity to ask him to undergo further tests which eventually revealed that he needed heart bypass surgery.

We – that is the extended family – celebrated Archie’s 80^th birthday on 28^th November 2002, and less than a week later, he was in hospital for the necessary surgery. I don’t wish to prolong this story, so to cut the matter short, Arch suffered a stroke while the heart surgery was under way, and he lost a lot of his motor functions.

My sister, who is a registered nurse, recognised the problem and arranged for Arch to be admitted to the hospital where she works. There, he received appropriate treatment, and his condition was stabilised. He returned home, but was never very steady on his feet, despite a burning determination to live his life as it had been before his heart surgery.

I visited my parents every day, and on more than one occasion I received a phone call asking me to go and pick Arch up off the floor. My mother was incapable of doing this, so it fell to me to be on call at all hours. I didn’t mind, he was my father.

Between them, my parents decided that a 4-bedroom house was too big for them to manage, so the decision was made to sell and downsize. This was a great relief to me as it remover the temptation of the garden from Archie’s reach. Archie had been a gardener, and he retained the remains of his pre-November 2002 garden. He would amble into this garden to tend it, and as often as not, he would fall over and be unable to get up. I had to carry him in from the garden on three occasions. He finally gave up his attempts to maintain his garden when he decided that the “falling over and getting carried into the house” routine was undignified for a man of his age. I was glad of that.

Not long after my parents moved to their new accommodation, I needed to visit Thailand to be a part of my wife’s application for a visa to come to Australia as a spouse. The day that I departed Australia, my mother suffered a stroke - not surprising as she had smoked for about 50 years of her life. Thanks to the medical practitioner who cares for our family, my father was taken out of my mother’s care and hospitalised. I returned a few weeks later, and not long after that, my father was transferred to an interim facility to wait for a place in a nursing home, an aged care facility. Three weeks later, he had his place.

Neither Archie nor my mother wanted him to go to the nursing home, but they accepted that because Archie was no longer able to walk, amongst other problems, they would not be able to cope with him at home. He would not be able to take himself to the toilet, and my mother would certainly not be able to provide sufficient assistance to overcome this difficulty. It simply had to be the nursing home, there were no other options. I had my own home with family, so I was not really able to live with my parents.

This nursing home was OK. There were 4 beds to a room – big rooms – and the staff seemed competent enough to me. Following her stroke, my mother had lost her driver’s licence, so I became her personal driver. Initially, my mother visited Archie 7 days per week, but she decided that she had to have some time to herself for leisure and relaxation, so she only visited him 5 days a week after the first month he was in the home.

Arch declined slowly at first, then the gradient of decline steepened and the decline gathered momentum. Going to visit Archie changed from a pleasure to a duty to a chore to an unendurable pain. At one time, about two weeks before Archie’s death, I commented to my mother that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to visit Archie, it was that I didn’t want to see him the way he had become.

On the afternoon of 30^th August, my mother received a phone call from the nursing home telling her that she might like to come and see Archie. I am her taxi, I also attended. Archie was totally uncommunicative, and my mother tired of this non-communication very quickly [no demerits to her, remember that she suffered a stroke, and had lost a lot of her interpersonal skills, including her patience], so she asked me to take her home. I lingered after she walked out and held my father’s hand and told him that I would be visiting him tomorrow. As it happened, I did visit him on the Friday, but not the way that I had anticipated. As far as I know, I was the last member of the family to touch his hand while he still lived.

The entire family regarded his death as a welcome relief for the family, and a blessed release for Archie. We didn’t want him dead, we just didn’t want him to exist in a condition which we knew he had hoped would never be his own existence.

At 1 AM on 31^st August, Archie gained the release and the peace that he desired. The nursing staff had been keeping watch over him, knowing that the end of his life was imminent.

About 1:05 AM, I received the notification by phone of the passing of Archie from the nursing home. I passed this on to my sister and my brother, but decided to allow my mother the luxury of a night of unbroken sleep before we told her.

Archie’s funeral was held on 5^th September 2007. An article spanning a bit more than a half tabloid page appeared in this city’s principal newspaper celebrating the life and activities of Arch Harvey.

Arch Harvey may have passed away, but he still lives in the memories of those who knew him.

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