The Red Door

When I saw my father tied to a hospital bed like a science experiment, I felt a shift in my
priorities, and although my brother stood beside me, I suddenly felt completely alone.
2001 had already been an eventful year. I’d joined the band that would change my life,
I’d turned 21 and realised it was time to grow up (still a work-in-progress), September 11
had slammed into the bedrock of the western consciousness, and a month later my
father contracted peritonitis: a typically fatal illness.

Two days prior to dad winding up in the Intensive Care Unit at Epworth Hospital we had
been talking up in the wards. He appeared to be recovering well from the surgery to
remove a small abnormality in his bowel. Regular morphine hits were giving him the
high spirits of a drunken clown, and for a serious and dignified man like my father this
was a more priceless scenario than Visa could spin.

The following morning my step-mother, Chris, informed me that dad’s health was
declining. His temperature was high, he was nauseous, and he was becoming
disorientated. His surgeon had no explanation. By lunchtime dad had his own team of
doctors scratching their heads and furiously hypothesising the cause.

In the afternoon I was at home tuning my drum kit for a show that night at the DV8 night
club. Across the room the TV played the fifteen thousandth repeat of the plane flying
into the World Trade Centre. This followed with extracts from President Bush’s typically
hilarious fumbling patriotic speeches that always left serious questions about the man’s
grasp of the English language. Then BAM!, more plane-crash footage, just in case we’d
missed it. Amid the tapping of drum skins and the now familiar sounds of panic and
destruction, the phone rang. It was Chris.

“Your dad is going back in for surgery,” she says.

“Oh shit!” say I, as tower one collapses to dust on my TV screen.

The surgeons had decided that the likely explanation for dad’s condition was that
something had gone wrong in the first surgery, but being surgeons it was naturally not
their fault. Two major surgeries within three days of each other is a lot for anyone to
deal with, even a strong, healthy man like my father. I was alarmed, to say the least.

I’m not sure what time it was when I saw my father that night. Maybe nine o’clock. It
seemed irrelevant. Time stopped the moment I stepped foot over the threshold of the
ICU. Most areas of a hospital close down to some extent at night. The patients sleep and
the nurses sit behind desks trawling through paperwork until a time when they are
needed. Doctors are nowhere to be found. But the ICU is active at all hours. At night it’s
semi-dark. The work station in the center of the room is well lit, but the light stops at its
perimeter. The rest of the unit is gently lit by the oozing green glow of the various exit
signs around the room. Heart monitors beep monotonously at each bedside. Breathing
machines force air into the lifeless lungs of people bathed in the shadow of death. Some
will pull through. Some won’t.

As the nurse led my brother and me through the ICU I immediately became aware of the
jammed wheel of time. There was no point in measuring seconds or minutes. The clock
hands simply ceased to serve a purpose, like a depth pole in a dried up river bed. As we
rounded a curtain we were confronted with a picture that didn’t make sense all at once.
I recognised the man in the bed but the scene was too unreal or unfamiliar or impossible
to comprehend cognitively. Behind a tangle of hoses and wires was the face of my father.
He looked anguished. His arms had been tied to the railing on each side of the bed to
stop him tearing the tubes from his throat and nose. The doctors were forcing him into
the blackness of a coma but he wasn’t going quietly. That stoicism I knew so well had
overtaken my father’s base instincts.

My older brother, Nathan, and I had never been good at talking to each other. Growing
up our idea of communication usually meant a fist fight. Being the younger brother and
much smaller I rarely came off best. So I’d like to say that when we were presented with
a scene like that where we were forced to be one hundred percent present, where we
could not ignore the gravity of our shared experience that we were able to scale the
walls of our monosyllabic history and communicate like normal people. It was never
going to happen. All we could do was stand over the man who had raised us alone and
fight to the death any emotion that dared try for physical expression of itself. It almost
came as a relief when a vague, drunk version of consciousness snatched dad from his
coma and brought him into conflict with his restraints. Nathan and I manned an arm
each trying to pacify him, but even under heavy sedation he was stronger than the both
of us, and as always, stubborn as hell.

“Stop it, dad!” growled Nathan, more out of fear than anger, I think.

We used our voices loaded with any words we could find to calm him, and he must have
known we were there. His head fell back against the pillow and his arms back by his
sides. We joked that we’d need tougher restraints. Then we went back to our silent
observation. Eventually Nathan spoke up.

“He’ll pull through. He’s a tough old bugger.”

I just nodded. I could hear the panic in his voice. The last thing my brother would ever
want me to know was that he was scared, and I’d never slight him by drawing attention
to it. Standing there staring at my father, watching his chest rise and fall in a state of total
and complete vulnerability, I felt the strangest calm wash through me. We had been told
that his situation was bad. We had been told that for the next twelve hours he would be
teetering on the very precipice between life and death. But I was calm. In hindsight I
think it may have been a calmness that only comes with incomprehension verging on
ignorance. Or perhaps a part of me knew I wasn’t meant to lose my father that night.
Whatever it was, I left the ICU after saying what, for all I knew, may have been my last
goodbye. After leaving the hospital I drove my car to the city and played the DV8 gig. I
never once mentioned to my band-mates a word about my father.

I arrived home that night around two in the morning. I was exhausted. After eating a
sandwich and watching a taped episode of the Simpsons I eventually collapsed into bed,
but I couldn’t sleep. I lay there staring through the crack in the curtains at the stars
above and thought about my father in that hospital bed. I wondered if he was still a
citizen of planet Earth. I wondered what my life would be like without him. I wondered
until my head hurt.

Dad survived through the night, but he was not improving. I made the hour long drive to
the hospital and arrived at around 10AM. The journey through the labyrinth to the ICU
was one I would become very familiar with. In through the Bridge Road entrance; left at
the café with the typically bad but necessary hospital coffee; elevator to the second
level; left, then right past reception; down the corridor; left; another elevator; up to the
third floor; past the gurneys then hard left; up the corridor; the red double-doors on the
right.

When I got there several family members were already standing outside the ICU. Only
two immediate family members were allowed in the ICU at any one time, so there was a
constant line of sisters, brothers, sons, and Chris at the ICU door. Chris had immediately
appointed herself the gatekeeper of the red door. No one was getting past without her
consent. No one but Nathan and me.

Chris was there when I arrived. She’d slept in the ICU visitors’ room down the hall. You
could question her methods of protecting my father, but you couldn’t question her
devotion to him. I still try to keep that in mind on the odd occasion when she’s going
about the complicated business of being a pain in the arse.

I wanted to go in straight away. Two of my aunties were just coming out so I jumped the
queue. The ICU is an incredibly sterile place. Before entering it is mandatory to kill every
bit of bacteria on your hands with the sanitising gel in the pump bottle at the door. You
don’t step foot into that room without hospital-clean hands. Now knowing the
procedures I headed straight in where I was met with the smiles from a few nurses. The
kinds of smiles that say, “We reluctantly welcome you into our workspace.” Apparently
my family had been on a revolving-door roster of visitations since visiting hours started.

Dad looked more peaceful now. He was in a fully comatose state. He’d never looked so
old. His skin was grey and looked brittle like paper. I noticed he had a tube coming out of
his throat. Not out of his mouth: his throat. He also had a series of little round bags
hanging off his abdomen. They were collecting a yellowy liquid that I assumed was puss.
I didn’t know if there was any point in talking to him. It seemed silly to talk to someone
who was in a state of unconsciousness well beyond normal sleep. I’d heard that people
in comas can hear to some extent, but it still didn’t make much sense. Just then Chris
came up behind me and stood on the other side of the bed.

“Kerard, Aidan’s here,” she said in her gentle but unnecessarily loud voice.

Chris is from one of those families that are completely unaware of the term indoor

voice. “Say hello to your dad. He can hear you.”

I found that hard to believe. But on the off chance she was right I spoke.

“Hi, dad. How are you feeling?” I immediately regretted the question. What a stupid
question to ask someone who is in a coma and as sick as they will ever be. Not to
mention he couldn’t answer me.

“Just talk to him, love,” says Chris. “He needs to know you’re here, so just spend a
minute with him and then we’ll go for a coffee and I’ll tell you what’s happening.”

I spoke to dad for a few more minutes. Chris went back to the red door so I didn’t feel
quite so silly. I told him about the gig the night before. I told him that I was dropping out
of TAFE and was surprised when he didn’t wake up just to choke me Homer Simpson
style. I told him I didn’t like the course; that it wasn’t for me; that I had more important
things to worry about at the time. I had no idea if he could hear me or if I may as well be
talking to a garbage can on the street. The heart monitor maintained a solid tempo the
whole time so I figured he hadn’t heard the part about me quitting TAFE.

Down in the café Chris and I sat at one of the dark timber tables stirring our respective
hot beverages. She couldn’t have caffeine so she drank what my dad called “birdseed
tea.” In reality it was chamomile. Other people sat around us presumably having similar
conversations about their sick or dying loved ones. The coffee was terrible. It was that
kind of coffee that makes you grimace with every sip like you’re drinking bad whiskey. It
didn’t take long for Chris to start slapping me with facts about the human bowel and
immune system, infection and antibiotics. I got the full run-down on dad’s condition.

A mistake the size of a pin head was all it took to land my father in a world of shit. When
the surgeon removed a small portion of dad’s bowel and sewed the ends back together,
he left the tiniest hole in the join. When dad was given a glass of water in the hours
following his first surgery he had experienced abdominal pain. That was the contents of
his bowel leaching into his abdominal cavity and parading around his organs like a
fucking marching band of bacteria. The result of such a surgical snafu is a massive
infection of the peritoneum – the thin tissue that lines the abdominal wall and covers
the organs. This, I learned that day, is what peritonitis is. If you are unfortunate to have
your organs literally swimming in shit you are, as the surgeon who cocked up your
surgery probably wouldn’t say, potentially fucked!

I stared into the mud that inhabited the cup in front of me. There was a growing
expectation for it to crawl out and go and start a business. But it stayed there, stagnant
and undrinkable. It didn’t matter though. The coffee was only there to facilitate a
difficult conversation. Coffee has mediated many a hardship, softening the blow with its
Earthy, dark, bitter state of disappointment.

Having a better understanding of what was happening inside my father’s body made the
whole production much more real. It brought credibility to an otherwise absurd
narrative. That was until the narrative became a soap-opera that would rival any of
television’s over-acted hospital dramas. Things were already tense. They had been tense
since day one and as the seriousness of dad’s condition increased, so did the tension in
the family. Dad’s five sisters were alternating shifts to stand by the red door and battle
the gatekeeper. My late grandfather called his five daughters the Mafia. Collectively they
were (and still are) a terrifying quintet of intimidating, highly strung, occasionally
hysterical, often unreasonable, frequently irrational feminine fury.

Consequently, when the Mafia – all strong willed women – encounter an equally strong
force such as Chris, it’s best to hide behind something large and heavy. The tension
alone could crush a man’s ribcage like a Coke can. Adding high drama and emotion to
such a volatile mix of personalities…let’s just say you can still smell the friction burn in
the corridors of Epworth. But the dynamic of this stand-off took an unpredictable turn
on dad’s third night in the ICU. My mother, former friend turned mortal enemy of Chris,
had traveled to Melbourne from South Australia to be with my brother and I and to see
our father. Chris was careful not to express her feelings about this anywhere near
Nathan or I. But we heard all about it. There was plenty of “What the fuck is she doing
here?” and “She’s not going anywhere near my husband” (keep in mind they weren’t
married) and “I am not leaving this door as long as she’s anywhere near this hospital”.
These impassioned cries rolled like fireballs down the corridor to the waiting room that
Nathan and I were in.

This was when the Mafia dropped all to keep the peace for the benefit of their brother.
Chris was carefully chaperoned out of the hospital by several sisters. They took her to
Bridge road to find somewhere that was still serving coffee at 9PM. The remaining sisters
escorted mum into the hospital via another entrance so that paths would not be crossed
and the red door would not become the blood-red door.

Mum came to us in the waiting room first; another strong-willed woman thrown into the
melting pot. Mum is a little more in control of her emotions than Chris. Though she can
be overly dramatic, she is rarely hysterical. Chris is a fucking Shaolin master of hysteria.

Apart from my 21st birthday two months before, I hadn’t seen mum in about a year, but
one thing I could always count on was her consistency in swooping in at the eleventh
hour of a crisis to make a grab for the Mother of the Year award. Nathan and I both have
a sordid history with our mother. She left when we were both very young and had done
some pretty terrible things to us, but more importantly, to our father. We knew she still
cared deeply for him, but she was too deep in her own rabbit hole to ever act
accordingly.

Nathan and I greeted our mother with jealously guarded love and kept her at an
emotional distance. This was a self-protective method we had both learned over the
years of disappointment and crushed expectations. Nathan, being two years older, had
been more aware of her wrong-doings and had refined his defenses to the point that
they often became offenses. He had made a sport of tearing our mother’s throat out
with venomous, embittered words. It was a relationship built on explosive conflict.

Before entering the ICU mum had devastated a nurse who tried to tell her she could not
go in because she was not immediate family. Mum was herself, a registered nurse and
explained quite clearly that that man in the ICU was the father of her children and if
anyone tried to stop her going in there would be a seriously complicated incident report
to fill out. For a small lady she breathes a ferocious fire.

After succeeding in crushing the poor nurse’s self-esteem she was permitted
(begrudgingly) to enter the ward. Dad had been moved closer to the door, presumably
because the staff were tired of the constant flow of traffic to and from his previous
position on the far side of the room. The two person rule remained, so Nathan waited
outside. The blinds were still open and the ambient green lighting of the ward was
polluted by the orange glow of the street lights, which poured in like a bushfire sky from
the city beyond the windows.

The next ten minutes were among the strangest of my life. My mother, despite her
selfishness, her betrayal, dishonesty, and her tenacious skills of manipulation, has an
amazing propensity for compassion. If I squinted hard enough I could almost imagine my
parents were still married; that she was holding the hand of the man she was completely
devoted to. One might say that that was what I wanted to see, but to be honest, I can’t
think of anything more upsetting to the natural order than my parents being together.
But in that moment I realised that, despite screwing him over at every turn, my mother
did, in some way, still love my father.

After some time I opted to trade places with Nathan. I knew that even he, with his
venomous tongue and animosity, would never make a scene in Intensive Care. We
traded places at the red door. I have no idea what Nathan and mum spoke about, or
even if they spoke at all. I went down the corridor to the ICU waiting room. It’s a room
that has obviously been set up for lengthy waits and nights devoid of sleep. I made a cup
of instant coffee and planted myself on the couch. The television only ever seemed to be
on ABC. That was fine by me though. I was developing a healthy loathing for commercial
television.

At that time around fifty percent of any news program was devoted to what was not
even yet known as 9/11 or September 11 or the September 11 Terrorist Attacks. The
words “terror”, “terrorism” and “terrorist” were systematically being enmeshed with
words like “Muslim”, “Islam”, and “Middle Eastern”. The ancient smell of the witch hunt
was on the breeze. I sat with my scolding hot cup of Nescafe Blend 43 and watched
footage of the suspiciously rapid and efficient cleanup of what was just being called
“Ground Zero”. The pride of the New York skyline was gone. The pride of the U.S nation
had been pulverised to dust, altering the perception of immortality for all Americans.
But amid the chaos and fear, the destruction and panic that was beginning to choke the
confidence of the western world, life carried on. The billions of stories being played out
on the planet carried on. Chris was in a café somewhere in Richmond drinking
chamomile tea with the Mafia and possibly scratching “Die, bitch!” into the table with
her car keys (I can only speculate on that); Nathan was holding his tongue in the
presence of our unconscious father while our mother looked down with loving eyes on
the man she will always regret walking out on; dad remained in a dream state where the
world that was moving around him was morphing in his mind into a Dali film; and then
there was me, sitting alone in a waiting room, drinking bad coffee and watching the
world change on a 32 inch screen, waiting for my father to wake up.

It was very early morning when dad did wake up three weeks later. The sunlight was just
beginning to stroke the spring blossoms on the trees below the ICU windows. Dad had
never seen the ICU. He had been unconscious as long as he’d been in there. His eyes
struggled to focus on anything. His senses had gone unused for the longest time since
the womb. His muscles had deteriorated. His round face had sunken and his ribs were
showing. The time he had spent in a coma was nothing more than a patchwork of
surrealist imagery. It would take him weeks to stitch reality back together in any

meaningful way.

Chris remained by dad’s bed-side until he left the hospital. The Mafia reluctantly
accepted that they would have to stand by their brother on Chris’s terms or not at all.
And despite Chris’s proven devotion to our father, Nathan still cannot find forgiveness
for her “I’ll scratch your eyes out” bedside manner. As for me, I took a very
“Switzerland” approach to the whole thing. I figured that family members are people we
are stuck with no matter what. And it’s much easier to stay out of the bullshit than land
face first in it.

Weeks, even months after dad walked out of Epworth the events that took place

over his hospital bed were blissfully unknown to him. I think he preferred it that way.

By: Aidan Hogg