I remember Rowena’s hospital room well. It was on the second floor, not far from the lifts. I remember the groaning of the metal trolleys, the squeak of the bed as it came up and down. There was a paper cut-out of a giraffe on the wall beside her, and pictures of Mary and Jesus and all the saints. There was a view of the sky from the window. She shared her section of ICU with five other children, whose faces and families were always changing.
As the year passed, our family routine evolved further. Mum still visited during the day and generally left in time to collect Anna, Lisa and James from school. Dad visited Rowena at night after work for a few hours, and then home to us for dinner. On Sundays we would all go in together. I only came in a couple of times a week now because I was spending more time at kindergarten. After kinder, I would usually go home with our family friends, the Andersons. I went to kinder with their daughter, Katherine. We would usually spend our afternoons chasing chickens in the backyard. Mum would come and collect me around 4 or 5 pm, or occasionally later, depending on how things went at the hospital, or how the traffic was faring.
I overheard my parents talking once about maybe moving to North Melbourne to be closer to the hospital, but we never did. They wanted to keep things as normal for us as they could, they explained later.
Although many people in our community would ask after Rowena, most of her visits were from family or very close friends, and this was due to my parents’ wishes. The truth is that she had quite a busy schedule as it was. Several days a week, a teacher would come for an hour or so, then she had her occupational therapist appointments with specially designed games to keep her stimulated, such as making decisions on what to add to a cake that was being baked. Later in the day she would taste the cake and review her work. Then she had her time with Sister Teresa, the pastoral care worker who attended to the whole of the ICU and had a very soft spot for Rowena (as did everyone). Once, a nun popped in to say hello. Mum was holding me on her hip at the time and they were having a conversation. I wanted them to please stop talking about Rowena all the time. Mum said to wait a minute, she wouldn’t be long, but I didn’t want to wait a minute, I wanted to go home, so, to move things along, I just went ahead and very gently poked the nun’s right boob with my finger. I remember being rather proud of doing that—how it got my mother’s attention. How the nun laughed, and then my mother, explaining I shouldn’t do that, and then how I laughed too. At the hospital, we laughed more than you’d imagine, considering how dire things were. This was still a childhood—my childhood—after all.
Once, when I kissed Rowena hello, apparently I got a bit too close and she whispered to Mum, like the boss she was, ‘Can you please ask her not to spit on me when she says hello?’
Mum giggled. Rowena might have been small, but she still called the shots. I said, ‘Sorry, Rowie, for spitting on you, I didn’t mean to spit.’ I wanted to be as close to her as I could, but I worried that I would accidentally knock the tube out of her throat, and the worrying made me even more awkward than I already was. Sometimes I would climb up on the bed and just put my head on her pillow and whisper into her ear. Sing. Ramble. I adored her. She was my little, big sister.
But at the same time—and it’s difficult to admit this, although they say it’s a classic sibling response—I resented her, too, and was jealous of her, of all the presents she got, all the visitors, the fact that every single conversation led to her, to her illness, to how she got it, to whether there was a cure, to the fact she was going to die, and it could be any day, so we’d best make the most of the time we had. It created a pressure, a storm in me: this thought that death was coming at any moment, and I should be able to stop it, but how?
Rowena was always thin. In the hospital, I watched her grow thinner still. I’ve always had a gift for worrying and, as a kid, one of my worries was that Rowena would disappear. I remember standing by her bed, comparing our limbs, noticing once how my arms were about the same width as her legs. I remember her stillness, how she lay propped up on those pillows to cushion the bones that poked out of her body. Every two hours the nurses had to turn and bag her—that is, clear her life-support machine and move her position to make sure she didn’t get bed sores. The nurses were so careful with her, but sometimes when a new nurse was learning how to do it, Rowena would cry with pain in her neck—one of the only places she could still feel sensation. She never liked making a fuss. She would settle quickly,
