When will I see you again
When will we share precious moments
Will I have to wait forever
Will I have to suffer
And cry the whole night trough?
When will I see you again
When will our hearts beat together?
Are we in love or just friends?
Is this my beginning
Or is this the end?
The final school term of 1995 was one of the hardest times of my life. In early September Matty was admitted into hospital and placed into a private room in the palliative care unit. This was the ward for the dying. I could never work out how he managed to swing a private room, while others with the same condition, were bunked up 10 to a room just a few metres down the hallway.....but this was all part of Matty's magnetic charm, even in death.
For the next three and a half months he rapidly deteriorated. There was never anything that the doctors could diagnose. One day his lymph nodes would be swollen out of proportion making it hard for him to breathe and he would be placed on oxygen. At other times he would be breaking out in burning rashes or be unable to control his bodily functions. The worst day was when his heart rate suddenly hit 384 beats per minute and he was rushed to intensive care with Christine and me spending a harrowing 4 hours waiting to find out that the doctors had managed to normalise his heart rate and he was returned to his room.
Christine and I became allies during this time. She was now spending the whole day and night with Matty. I would finish school at 3 and walk the 10 minutes to the hospital to spend the next 3 or 4 hours with him so she could get some rest. Both of us were emotionally and physically drained. Both of us were angry with the doctors who kept giving Matty 'experimental' drugs. Some of which seemed to work but others which resulted in him going into rapid decline for days on end. At this point we both confided in each other that it would be better if he simply passed away rather than continue suffering.
One afternoon I arrived and Matty seemed quite lucid (despite the drip delivering copious amounts of morphine) so Christine took the opportunity of going for a rest in the 'relatives room' while I stayed and chatted with Matty. Suddenly he gave a cry and started urinating uncontrollably. There was no bed pan handy and I could only put my hand over him to stop him pissing all over the bed. After he had finished I managed to remove and change the sheets with him still in the bed. When I went to wash my hands I realised that I had paper cuts (from school) all over my hands and they were stinging. Amazingly I never contracted anything, a point which would be almost ironic a few years later.
When I returned Matty was understandably embarrassed and humiliated. For the first time in almost 10 years he finally held his arms out to me and told me how much he loved me and how sorry he felt for the way he had treated me. He knew that I had nothing but total love for him and always had. He tried to explain that he had always known this but even though he felt the same there was something inside him which prevented him from admitting it and something which made him lash out at me instead of returning my love.
I didn't need any apologies. I just wanted my beautiful blonde boy to be better again. I wanted to see him shine and dazzle like he did the first day I met him in his bright blue jumper which matched his beautiful blue eyes. I wanted him to live.
A few days later Matty and Christine married. In the hospital ward, with two nurses acting as witnesses and without me knowing.
Back at school I was, thankfully, run off my feet. Our numbers had more than doubled and the elderly Kindergarten teacher, whose name totally escapes my retired. She was replaced by a wonderful young girl on her first teaching post. With the Principal and Carol both in their 60's more and more responsibility was falling on my shoulders.
I had a Year 2/3/4/5 class and most of the children were extreme behavioural and social cases. The new teacher was great but taking time to learn the ropes. Carol had years of experience but her age was a handicap. She had the Year 5/6 class and they were more than a handful. The Principal was totally useless. She was supposed to be a teaching principal, standing in to give us our allotted 2 hours a week free from teaching time but she always had an excuse as to why she couldn't cover for us. We had to share our 'relief' time between us, mostly running videos in the school hall or taking the children out to the park while each of us had a break to catch up on marking and programming.
The second last Friday of the school term and I was up early getting ready with the TV on in the background. There was the morning news running and a report came on which said 'a mother and 2 young children had burned to death in a house fire in Glebe' the previous night. I knew instinctively that it was one of our families. I rushed straight out the door and was at school at 7.30am.
Greeted by Carol and the DOCS teacher my worst fears were not only realised but added to. The 'sexually abused girl from Glebe's' mother, younger brother, who was in my class, and sister who was only 5 years had been trapped in their house when it caught fire and all had been burned to death.
To make matters worse two other families living either side of them, and both with children in my class had had their houses severely damaged. Even more dreadful was that during the course of the day we found out the incidents behind the horror.
It turned out that Wayne's mother and her current boyfriend had accused the other mother of stealing their mobile phone (this was when mobile phones were still 'bricks' and very expensive'. They had gone around to confront her numerous times during the day but she refused to open the door. Later in the evening she had hit up with heroin but not before locking the children in their bedroom. Wayne's mother and boyfriend returned in the early hours of the morning and threw a petrol bomb through the front window.
With the mother nodding off from her heroin hit, neither she or the children stood a chance. The fire gutted the house in no time and all that remained were three charred bodies. We later found out that Joey (the boy in my class) had put himself in front of his sister in the cupboard to try and protect her as the flames licked at their bedroom door.
There are no words to describe the horror of that day or that week. We all had to continue teaching, try and comfort the victims, and worse for me was that I had to handle a class where two of the boys were the children of the perpetrator of this shocking, senseless crime. Wayne's mother dobbed her boyfriend in and was released on bail, while her boyfriend was charged and locked up. This meant that Wayne and his brother were still at school. The atmosphere in the classroom was bitter and tragic. I don't remember it clearly but I think we spent most of the week either watching videos, playing sport or trying to cheer the children up by making Christmas decorations.
The following Friday, and the last day of the school year, was the funeral. Before leaving the hospital rang me to say that Matty was in rapid decline and could pass away at any moment.
The funeral was dreadful. A split family all in mourning and all accusing each other of neglect. Verbal fights erupting during the sermon. Other families all affected and crying. Matty dying. It was all too much for me and I had to leave the church in tears. One of the 'normal mothers' followed me outside. I was in hysterics and in front of her boys (both in my class) I finally told her about Matty. It had been forever since I had let go. It had been over 10 years before I finally had a mother who just held me and let me cry everything out. Eventually I pulled myself together and returned to finish the last school day of the year.
By the time I reached the hospital I was a wreck. So much so that the nurses took one look at me and took me aside to ask me what was wrong. When I explained to them the events of the day (the story had been playing on the national news for the past week) they immediately gave me a bottle full of pills and insisted I take two before going in to see Matty.
Matty was by now slipping in out of consciousness. When he was awake he was totally unaware of his surroundings and becoming delusional. For everything that Christine did to me in the past few years, taking Matty from me, causing so many rifts between us and marrying him behind my back, nothing made me hate her more than her response to his last few tragic days.
She couldn't cope whatsoever. She had no idea how to handle his babbling or his delusional episodes. When he woke up and started asking why Toby was here (Toby was my dog) and was actually looking at Christine's sister she just broke down and admitted that she didn't know what to do and asked me how I could handle it so calmly.
I was angry, but used to dealing with children, I explained to her that it was just the same. It was easy for me to go along with Matty's rambling and pretend it was another infant child playing make-believe. I would engage him in conversation which was totally inane but gave him the comfort of knowing that someone was there to listen to him.
He lasted through Friday night, all day Saturday and most of Sunday. Christine had by this time given total responsibility of sitting with him to me. She just couldn't cope or deal with him. I understand now that it was a very emotional and stressful time for her, but at the time, I couldn't believe that she didn't have the guts to 'just pretend' and help me humour him in his dying moments.
Late Sunday afternoon and Matty woke up. We spent a few hours watching TV and chatting. Whatever subject he brought up I just went along with it. He fell asleep again and around 7pm he woke up again. The television show 'Keeping Up Appearances' was playing. For years we had joked how the main character was so similar to my mother. Matty looked at the TV and said 'what's your mother doing on TV?' We laughed together, our final recognition of each other before he slipped back into a coma.
I knew that was the end. I lay with him on the bed for an hour or so. Holding him, talking to him, forgiving him. I couldn't forgive Christine. When I left the hospital she was fast asleep. I didn't even try to wake her.
At home I smoked myself into a stupor and eventually fell asleep around 11pm. As god is my witness I woke up to find (or dreamt) that Matty was standing at my bedroom door (the image is still as vivid now as it was then) calling my name over and over again.....the phone rang, and rang and rang......when I stood up Matty smiled at me and faded away. I didn't need to pick up the phone to know that it was the hospital. Matty had passed away a few minutes before - but not without coming to me for a final goodbye.
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