1992...

Friday, March 6, 1992, “Jayd, I’m being arrested for murder.”

My 30-year-old brother; in tears over the phone, made the distinct croak of a man who was experiencing irrepressible fear. I felt my stomach lurch in utter denial. As though my glass had been snatched from my hand, claret splashed over the kitchen floor as I scrambled to hold something to support my failing legs.

“You’re what?”

“The police will be at your place in 20 minutes. They want to talk to you.”

Shock reverberated through my gibberish as my partner took the phone from me and told my brother not to panic. It was all a huge mistake.

Moments later, I opened the door to two policemen. One young, green and immature barrelled his way into our home without introducing himself while his burley, fatherly type partner apologised with his eyes and waited as I closed the door.

“This is gunna be bigger ’n Ben Hur!” I’d lost all respect for this power hungry, callow idiot and faced him with a smile. “Would you like a cup of coffee, water perhaps? If this is bigger than Ben Hur, it’s going to be quite a statement.”

Having declined the coffee and water, I offered him nothing further for the duration. He would painstakingly take my statement over the following two hours.

My father had died on 27th September 1991. He had taken his own life.

Dad and his (third) wife had been married only a few years. They’d moved interstate for eighteen months then back to Victoria where she insisted they live in an affluent part of Melbourne. She was a birdlike woman who tried to play the role of the toff but instead was now inundated with responsibilities for a man who had become ill.

Only days before, Dad had been given an ultimatum. Either agree to divorce or be admitted into a home. His wife was neither prepared or wanted to care for him. Naturally, she would hold onto the house, but he had to go.

He had called me to ask if we had room for him to stay for a while. My then partner was adamant. He and my dad had never got along and so I was forced to deny him temporary shelter.

Dad then went to live with my brother and his wife.

She and I had had a fierce argument just before Dad died. She had drawn up a roster to have her home regularly maintained. By us, her extended family. Between my brother and I, (she did not include her two grown daughters), we would mow lawns, clip hedges, clear roof gutterings and keep the grounds tidy. I drew a line in the sand.

“You maintain your own yard and if need be, hire the help. You’ve got the money, lady. We don’t live there. We’ve never stepped foot over your threshold except once when you invited us to lunch under duress.”

That would be the last time I spoke with her.

It was on this fateful Friday night I was informed by the police that she had accused us — and my brother and I were suspected of murdering our father.

We were summoned to appear at the Coroner’s Court in June of 1992.

Anguished beyond anything I had ever known, I was called as the first witness and stood before the magistrate where I answered every question he asked me. My nerves were coiled tight.

Yes, my father had been found by my brother on the morning of Friday 27th September 1991.

Yes, my brother had driven home from work at mid-morning to check on him.

Yes, he had found a packet of Serapax beside Dad on the table and yes, only four tablets out of 25 remained.

“Who had given your father the Serapax?” I looked from the judge into the eyes of a woman who, emotionally empty, looked back at me with eyes that looked as if they could drill through granite. “The local doctor had prescribed them two days before Dad died and my brother, at his request supplied them. Dad couldn’t sleep. He was devastated having to leave his home.

My brother called triple zero and my father was conveyed to a local hospital where later that evening, he was transferred to Box Hill Hospital’s intensive care.” The judge looked down upon his notes, looked up at me and gently asked if my brother and I had jointly agreed to have Dad’s life support system turned off at 5.20pm on Saturday 28th September 1991.

I looked at the judge then at my father’s widow and with a resounding, “Yes”, I answered his question. I wanted to drive nails into her eyes.

“Can you tell me about the instance wherein you believed your father was suicidal?” I still hadn’t forgiven Dad for what he’d done and who, although dead, was now putting us through this nightmare and the word suicide resounded like a death knell.

I had a hushed audience but the eyes of the woman who had wanted to have my brother and I incarcerated watched me as she seemed to perch on the edge of her seat. She appeared as though she was ready to eject herself from her chair and shout “Objection, Your Honour!” but it appeared her daughters, who sat either side of her had her hands “shackled” by their own.

“There were several instances, Your Honour,” I told him.

“Once when I was sixteen and my Dad told me he’d take his .22 rifle he stored in his wardrobe and blow his own head off.

When I was 22, Dad’s marriage to his second wife failed. He’d been taken to the cleaners and walked back into my mother’s life six years after he’d left it. He would leave my Mum again 2 years later. He reminded me he still had the rifle.

He called me at work one morning. “I’m on the beach. I’ve lost everything”, he said. “I need a thousand dollars. Can I borrow it?” I never saw it again.

Then he met his third wife. It wasn’t a happy union. In fact, I believe he was now getting to a stage where he figured he’d finish up a very lonely old man if he didn’t get married right away.

Dad asked me to take their wedding photos. They were the saddest photos I’ve ever seen.

Not too much later, he seemed more willing to “take the rifle and do the job privately.” His next reminder came just after his third wife”, I indicated the raw-boned woman sitting in the court room, “had asked him to leave their home. Trouble was, he was now too weak to proceed.”

Hatred was boiling in my stomach like a pit of lava. I turned to find the pinched face of my ex-step-mother with its ever-present expression of suffering looking back at me. She could peel an apple with her stare.

Suffering from oxazepam toxicity, a man with emphysema, bronchitis, pneumonia and ischaemic heart disease, my father could barely walk 20 meters without having to sit down.

“My father’s wife, his widow, had pushed Dad during an argument and broken several ribs in the process,” I told the judge. She told him it’s her way or the highway. She wanted nothing further to do with him.”

The judge looked down at his notes and then with a richly resonant voice stated he was satisfied my father had indeed suicided.

Court was dismissed that afternoon at five after 3 pm.

Outside, my brother and I hugged each other and walked to our respective cars. There was a maturity, a quiet strength about him now. Marked there by time and moulded by suffering.

From today on, we’d begin to heal.

Our mother died 10 years later. I suspect of a broken heart. She had never loved anyone else. For her, her vows meant until death do they part. She’d meet her Maker and the man she’d loved all her life.

My father’s will was read some months later. My brother was left everything Dad owned.

I expect my ex-stepmother began to wither in that house in Toffsville. And the fact that maintenance had never been forthcoming from my brother and I surely indicated she’d been hemmed in by all the unkempt gardens. She sold the house not long after and bought a smaller abode with the proceeds.

I never contested my father’s will. Nor did I reply to his widow’s three-page letter I received a few weeks after our day in court.

I still have the letter but choose never to see her again.

As a footnote, I am about to launch onto a journey to try to alleviate the crap this experience has left with me. And whilst I’m one to ask “Will this matter in two weeks, two years?” It has lingered for too many. It’s time to let go.