My brother's last months weren't easy, but now he's where he would have wanted to be

(First published in The Dominion Post, August 25.)

My beloved older brother Justin died a year ago today. We buried his ashes last Saturday in the Waipukurau Cemetery.

It was a simple but moving ceremony – a fitting final act in an exemplary life that touched many people.

It was a therapeutic occasion too, because it helped erase memories of the last months of Justin’s life. These were not easy.

He and his family had been on a roller-coaster for months: in and out of Wellington Hospital, subjected to endless tests and scans and in constant, acute pain whose source proved hard to identify.

Surgeons eventually removed an infection of his prostate and at the same time took out a section of cancerous bowel that had been found by chance.

For a short time the prognosis looked good. We thought the cause of Justin’s suffering had been found and dealt with.

But the pain continued, accompanied by a debilitating weight loss that suggested there was something else going on that the doctors hadn’t found. 

Justin never showed a trace of self-pity, but there were times when he did get frustrated. He was an optimist by nature, and grateful for the care he was given, but toward the end his faith in the system was eroded. A bewildering number of surgeons and doctors came and went. The messages he was getting were conflicting and confusing.

Justin suspected his illness was related to a treatment called brachytherapy, which he had received privately four years earlier for prostate cancer. When eventually he got to see one of the specialists who had administered the brachytherapy, he was assured his sickness was unrelated. But the doubt lingered.

Eventually he was diagnosed with high-grade urothelial cancer. This was revealed to him out of the blue one morning when he was re-admitted to Wellington Hospital in acute pain.

The diagnosis had been made on June 27 but he wasn’t told until July 30. The doctor who broke the news to him did so almost casually, assuming he already knew.

Whether the time lag reduced his life prospects, I don’t know, but logic tells me it must have. It seemed that a vital window of opportunity had been lost.

A major operation was scheduled. Surgery to remove Justin’s bladder, prostate and urethra was expected to take eight hours. It was made clear this was a life-threatening procedure in his weakened state, but it was a risk he and the family were prepared to take. 

We all gathered, hoping for the best but prepared for the worst. Then, early on the morning of the scheduled surgery, Justin was told the operation wouldn’t proceed because there was no intensive care bed available for him when he came out.

It was a crushing blow. I think Justin gave up all hope that morning. He no longer trusted the doctors to tell him the truth. He just wanted to go home.

In the emotion of the moment, we wondered whether the doctors had been stringing us along – that perhaps the lack of a recovery bed was a convenient excuse for not going ahead with an operation that had little prospect of success in the first place.

Maybe they thought they were being kind letting Justin think the operation might save him, when in fact it would have been less cruel to tell him what seemed the obvious truth: “There’s nothing more we can do – you’re dying.”

By coincidence, the day before the operation was scheduled, we bumped into a respected senior medical specialist whom I happened to know. When we explained why we were at the hospital and what we had been told would happen to Justin the following morning, he gave us a knowing look and made a comment that I didn’t quite understand.

It was only later that we realised he had been trying to suggest, without actually saying so, that perhaps his colleagues weren’t being entirely honest with my brother.

So Justin went home to die, and now he’s at rest in the town where he spent his formative years before he moved to Wellington, to a career in broadcasting that was to make him a much-loved presence in Wellington households over several decades.

He’s buried in the same plot as his older brother Martin. Our parents lie next to them and another older brother, Peter, who drowned in 1958, is only a couple of metres away.

I can think of far worse places to spend eternity. The cemetery is on an elevated site sloping gently to the west, with a pleasing outlook toward Pukeora Hill and the Ruahine Range beyond. Justin’s widow, Judy, and the rest of his family are satisfied it’s where he would have wanted to be.

The angels who looked after my brother

(First published in The Dominion Post, September 2.)

The world recently watched as exceptional people did extraordinary things at the Rio Olympics, but over the past weeks I’ve been reminded that exceptional people do extraordinary things every day right here in our own backyard.

My much-loved brother Justin died last week from cancer. He died as he would have wanted – at home on the Kapiti Coast, surrounded by people he loved.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the dedicated efforts of nurses from the Mary Potter Hospice and the community health service.

Twice every day in the last weeks of Justin’s life, these angels – there’s no other word for them – called at the house to ensure everything possible was done to make him comfortable.

They worked quietly and efficiently, all the while talking to Justin, even after he had lapsed into a coma. There was no trace of that slightly patronising tone nurses are sometimes criticised for adopting toward their patients. They addressed him as they might an old friend, always using his name.

It was inspirational to observe the gentle and loving way the nurses treated him, as I’m sure they do all the people they care for.

Most of us would regard looking after the dying as emotionally challenging work. It’s not a vocation to which all nurses would be suited. But it must have its own rewards, just as some admirable people get satisfaction from caring for the severely disabled and the mentally ill. We are collectively in the debt of these largely unsung heroes and heroines.

Certainly, having Justin at home made all the difference to the family, because it meant he was never alone.

We made sure there was no sepulchral silence in the house. That wouldn’t have been right, because he was a man who loved talk and laughter and was comforted by the sound of it.

To have had Justin end his life in the sterile atmosphere of a hospital, surrounded by beeping monitors, would have been unthinkable.  He had seen enough of hospitals over the previous few months. After his last stay, all he wanted was to go home.

Not so long ago, none of this would have been possible. I recall, about 35 years ago, interviewing a British doctor who came to New Zealand as an evangelist for the hospice movement.

He was like a visitor from another planet. The Mary Potter Hospice, named after a visionary Catholic nun, was then just getting started and the idea of specialist palliative care for the dying was still quite novel. I wonder how many people’s deaths have been made immeasurably easier since then, both physically and emotionally, by hospice care.

And it’s not just professional caregivers who make this possible. Only a few weeks ago another family member, on my wife’s side, died in the Mary Potter Hospice in Newtown.

On our visits we saw how heavily the hospice depends on volunteers. It was hard to distinguish these unpaid helpers from the professionals, since they exhibited the same level of devotion and commitment.

More than once, I watched as volunteers displayed endless patience with a confused and agitated elderly male patient – exceptional people doing extraordinary things, although that’s probably not how they see themselves.  

On a completely different level, on the day after my brother’s funeral this week my wife and I saw evidence of “ordinary” people – in this case, teachers – also making a difference.

Our grandson starts at Newlands Intermediate School next year and because his mother had a conflicting commitment, we took him to an orientation morning at the school.

Everything about it was a revelation. There was a contagious buzz about the school: a sense that the kids were there not because they had to be, but because they wanted to be.

Toby, the boy who showed us around, was articulate, confident and knowledgeable, but even more striking was his obvious pride in the school and his pleasure in being able to show it to others. 

As we wandered around, I felt privileged to be observing the New Zealand of the future in the making.

It will be a very different country from the one I grew up in. For a start, a very high proportion of the pupils are not of Anglo-Saxon origin. But there was an unmistakeable sense of inclusiveness. These were kids who were clearly very comfortable in each other’s company, despite widely varying cultural backgrounds.

Such things don’t happen by accident. The buzz must originate from the principal and teachers, who have created an educational environment where kids seem to feel happy, confident and eager to learn.

I came away with a feeling of optimism and a fresh appreciation of good things happening largely unnoticed right under our noses.

In defence of talkback radio

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, September 29.)

I AM a talkback listener. There, I’ve said it.

One hesitates to admit this because the world of talkback radio is said to be populated entirely by ranters, rednecks and bigots. The phrase “talkback radio mob” is common shorthand for bores and blowhards who are long on opinions and short on intellect.

The truth is that talkback radio, much like any other form of media, is a mixed bag.

The one consistent rule I’ve observed over many years is that the quality of talkback is largely determined by the quality of the host. If the host is intelligent, well-informed and concerned with matters of substance rather than banality and trivia, he or she is likely to attract callers of a similar calibre.

Not only does like attract like, but good hosts have little patience for rank stupidity, ignorance or bigotry, and are likely to dump moronic or abusive callers without much ado. Eventually the morons get the message and stop calling, or find a less discriminating host on another station (there’s usually one somewhere).

Most of my own talkback listening is done in the small hours. People often express surprise when I tell them I regularly listen to the midnight-to-dawn talkback shows, but when you’re not a good sleeper the sound of human voices can be a useful distraction from the pre-occupations that might otherwise clutter the mind. Music might be more soothing, but it leaves mental space that can be invaded by vexatious thoughts.

Talkback radio gives you something to engage with, yet you don’t want it to be too stimulating. After all, the purpose of going to bed (well, most of the time, anyway) is to sleep. The ideal all-night host, to my mind, strikes a delicate balance, promoting interesting conversation while trying to keep the mood reasonably relaxed.

I sometimes wish Pat Brittenden, an all-night host on NewstalkZB, would grasp this. He gives the impression of being on steroids, treating every caller as a challenge to his intellectual supremacy; someone who must be won over by the sheer force of his arguments.

To be fair to Brittenden, he’s smart; I just think his Socratic version of talkback would be better suited to a daytime slot. Bruce Russell, with whom he normally alternates, strikes a completely different tone. Certainly Russell has firm views which he sometimes expresses caustically, but they are leavened by a whimsical and engaging wit.

Over on the other all-night talkback programme, on Radio Live, you get either the former church minister Ewing Stevens – an octogenarian who uses his show to promote quack health remedies to the anxious and gullible (though it’s possible Stevens sincerely believes in their efficacy) – or Dudley Stace, who is given to talking about his motorcycle trips or encouraging viewers to call in with their views on such banal subjects as the best pie they’ve ever eaten.

As I said, the host largely determines the quality of the caller, and these two Radio Live hosts tend to bring out the type of insomniac who gives talkback a bad name.

Many people find night-time radio chatter comforting. This was never better demonstrated than in the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquake, when countless people, unnerved by the constant aftershocks, turned to early-hours talkback programmes not just for information, but also for the reassuring knowledge that others were sharing the same ordeal.

You quickly learn that there’s an alternative universe of insomniacs and other nocturnal creatures – security patrol men, long-haul truck drivers, all-night service station attendants, bakers making 2am starts – who keep the talkback studio buttons lit up while normal people slumber. I hesitate to call it a community, but it sometimes has that feeling.

Some callers are simply lonely or bored and have nothing to say. They give the impression of being infatuated with the sound of their own voices, and sensitive hosts often humour them more than they should.

Many callers, however, are articulate, witty, insightful and well-informed. I often think it’s a shame that their voices are not more widely heard – their sweetness wasted on the night-time air, to paraphrase the poet Gray.

At its best, talkback radio can be a reassuring confirmation that we live in an informed and robust democracy. New Zealanders are generally pretty savvy on matters of politics and many don’t hesitate to assert their right to free speech on talkback radio, just as they do in letters to the editor and (increasingly) in the online domain known as the blogosphere.

Ironically, blogosphere dwellers tend to look down on talkback as an inferior forum, the preserve of the unsophisticated dinosaur. I say this is ironic because debate in the blogosphere, being generally unmoderated, often degenerates into petty, toxic abuse of the most unedifying kind. Talkback radio at least has a host who can hit the dump button when discussions get unpleasant or defamatory.

One other thing you can’t help noticing when you become a habitual talkback listener is the disproportionate number of non-New Zealand accents. Notwithstanding my comments about New Zealanders not hesitating to assert their right to free speech, the number of callers with British accents is striking.

My brother Justin, a Wellington morning talkback host on NewstalkZB, referred to this recently in a Dominion Post interview following his announcement that he’s retiring at the end of the year (to be replaced by Sean Plunket, formerly of Radio New Zealand).

Justin said one thing that irked him, after 23 years on the programme, was people’s reluctance to phone in. He used the word “passionless” – the same word writer Gordon McLauchlan used to describe New Zealanders in his famous 1970s book The Passionless People.

According to Justin, only 5-10 percent of his listeners ever call in. He reckons English and Dutch listeners are far more likely to phone because they come from cultures where people are not afraid to speak out.

I’m not going to argue with him – he’s my big brother, after all – but I reckon the ratio of callers to listeners must be higher on night-time talkback. Either that, or there are far more insomniacs out there than we ever imagined.