Barbara Lang – Finally At Peace

By Anton Lang ~

It’s a rare thing for me to write about something as personally private as this will be, and it’s more difficult than anything else I have written about across the more than fifteen years I have been contributing to our home site here.

I have been absent from the site for the last two and a half weeks, and that is because my wonderful good lady wife passed away on the 18th April. We had the most wonderful 42 years together as husband and wife, and there’s not one day of that time I would wish to change.

She has had major health problems all our time together, and they progressively worsened over the last four years. For the last year, she has been in almost constant debilitating pain. Now while her passing was unexpected, well, you never expect something like that, it is something that means that she is finally ….. at peace.

We met in 1980, under somewhat unusual circumstances, and something wonderful happened for the both of us. Seven and a half Months later we were married. In those Months prior to our marriage, there was an awful lot of discussion. You see, she was almost nine years older than I was, and that concerned her, and I might add, a lot of other people as well. Her previous relationship was with a brute of a man who was the cause of all the problems with her health. So she had sworn off men altogether. For me, I had experienced love as a young man, and between that first real love and meeting Barbara, there had been a few other ladies, but not that love I had experienced, until I met Barbara, something I actually thought might never happen again, and that love between Barbara and me developed quite quickly, and was almost a revelation to me, now at the age of 29, so this was no frivolous young love situation. Barbara was decidedly concerned about that age difference, enough to not contemplate marriage as she thought that when she became older, and with her major health problems, I might not wish to continue staying with her. My thinking on that was that as she got older, then so would I as well, and in her old age, I would be there for her. All those major health problems had started nine years earlier, and they almost took her life, and in the end, they did take nine long Months to get to a stage where they could be, well, managed at least. To that end, she had a kindly old gentleman who was her family Doctor, and he was long past retirement age, but preferred to remain in Practice, and he asked Barbara if she would bring me along to meet him, to better explain those health concerns, well, I suspected just to check me out to see if I was indeed serious about this relationship. He was brutally honest explaining that because of the major health problem, Barbara would probably not live to reach 60 years old, 65 at best. (and she made it to 80 years old) I’m pretty sure he was convinced that this was ‘for real’. Her major problem was Epilepsy, and that was well managed with the medication she was on, and I was well aware of what to do in the case of any seizures. I was in the middle of my 25 year career in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) at the time, and we adjusted into married life relatively easily. She had three children from that earlier relationship, but only one of them was of an age when he was still living at home, so now we were already a ‘three person’ family, and there was no chance of our having a baby together, well, sort of quite rigidly, umm, ‘suggested’ during that meeting with her former family Doctor, and I was okay with that, although she really did want to have that child with me.

Her health remained reasonable for longer than either of us suspected really.

I left the RAAF in 1992, and we settled down on The Gold Coast, where both of us had family. Her father was a wonderful gentleman, and at the start he was not all that certain I was suitable for his daughter, knowing of her health problems and the age difference especially. By now he was happy that it was going well, and he came to a respect for me he only told me about in later years, when we became very close, especially in the year and a half before he passed away. We would talk often. He had two daughters, Barbara and her younger sister. However, he had two sons as well, one of them dying after three days from birth, and another who so tragically passed away at the age of ten, Barbara’s beloved older brother. Towards the end he told me that I had become the Son he wished his own boy had grown into, and that was such a wonderful thing to hear.

In 1996 Barbara had a major health scare with her Epilepsy that nearly took her from me. It took eight long Months to ‘get right’, and after so many opinions from so many (one of them an eminent) Specialists, it was finally sorted out by a young General Practice Doctor, who then immediately became our family Doctor.

In 2000, that same family Doctor told me that I needed to quit the workforce and remain at home to be her constant carer. That was a problem for me, and I was still only just under 50 years old, a problem not for the work, but a problem with income. Jim, our family Doctor arranged for Barbara to be placed on the Disabled Pension, and for me to then be placed on the Carer Pension. I already had what was ‘half’ an income from my RAAF Superannuation, a fortnightly payment, and these two Pensions and associated benefits meant that (almost) replaced the income I was getting from my current job at that time. And surprisingly, we lived comfortably with that.

We moved to Rockhampton in 2010 so we could be close to our daughter, and to be there as our young granddaughter grew up, a source of immense pleasure for the both of us. Eight years later we moved back her to Beenleigh where we live now.

A year after moving here, Barbara had another major health scare, which also nearly took her from me. This time it was serious Pneumonia, and she spent a Month in hospital. They drained fluid from her lungs, but couldn’t get all of it. Then she had a recurrence of her Epilepsy, whilst in hospital, (thankfully for that) and that was sorted with a newer Epilepsy medication, which stopped any of the seizures she would have, and there were two types of those seizures. However, her lung function was now much degraded, and she had a fairly constant and wracking cough from then on. Her breathing was now considerably poorer, and she had to take two breathing assistance medications, the ‘puffers’. She also had a very very slow and minor bleed from her stomach, and that was controlled with six Monthly blood ‘top ups’, and iron infusions, necessitating a few days each time in hospital. She had also developed some other health conditions associated with the even longer term side effects of 50 years of Epilepsy medication. There was also Peripheral Neuropathy, a constant (and sadly incurable) pain from her knees to ankles, and that was evidently the worst of all of them, because this was a constant pain, especially at night. I took over everything here at home over the last eight Months, and she has not left the house except for a couple of visits to our Doctor, and then straight back home.

This most recent stay in hospital was another of those blood ‘top ups’ and an iron infusion. Sadly, during her first night of what was only going to be a two day stay, her Epilepsy flared up again, and during the first seizure, she ingested stomach acids and bacteria back into her lungs after vomiting. The seizures continued almost on an hourly basis for the next 15 hours, when medication finally brought that under control, but the damage had already been done. They compared a new chest X-Ray with one of her earlier ones from a year or so ago, and saw the new and major damage to her lungs. The Senior ‘Attending’ Doctor told me on that first morning that this was something she could not recover from, as she was just so frail now. He mentioned that they were hoping her blood pressure would recover with IV fluids and antibiotics for the infection, but her BP just stayed stubbornly low. On the morning of the second day, he told me it was a futile exercise, and asked me how I felt about placing her on Palliative care and to let her just slip away. Knowing how Barbara had been for the last six to eight Months, and that she had told me that this would be her preference, I said that would be okay, albeit very sadly for me, but I knew the pain she was in, and that this would be the best thing to do, for her sake, not having to come back, and be still in that constant pain. Inexplicably, she regained consciousness not long after the Attending left, and while very slow in speech, she was back with me. There was no ‘real’ pain, now due to the Palliative care she had been placed under, and she knew this was her last chance to be with me. I took the chance to get her on the phone to her daughter in Rockhampton, because she just could not come down on ‘instant’ notice like this, but Barbara spoke with Tracie, and our two granddaughters. Her (well our) two Son live locally, so I got them to come in and speak with their Mum while she was still ‘with us’. On that second morning, she was still lucid, only not as much as the day before. Luckily, that Senior Attending saw her like this and was astonished to see it. That gave him the chance to explain to her where we ‘were’ at that time, and that she would not recover from this, and was on Palliative Care, and Barbara took it an awful lot better than I expected her to. Her second Son visited her for two hours that afternoon, and she was overjoyed at that, but she was by now ever so slowly slipping away. Around an hour after he left, she slipped back into unconsciousness, and did not recover. The following morning I was with her again, and stayed with her all day and most of the night as she slowly passed. I whispered occasionally to her as se slipped away.

Since then, I have had time to grieve, and the things I have to do have kept me busy, which is something to do, thankfully. Her service was beautiful, and there were only five family members present, which was exactly the way she wanted it. She will be interred with her parents, something she always wanted, and joyfully, she is with them and her two brothers right now, even though she sits here on my shoulder.

Oddly a number of things have happened to me since she passed, inexplicable things that I would just love to tell her, but I suspect she already knows them.

We had forty two wonderful years of marriage together, and our children say that was the reason she lived 20 years longer than her kindly old Doctor expected her to live. Our three children and four grandchildren have a strong bond with me now, and while on my own now, she is with me forever. The image at right is one our daughter found while looking through many boxes of photographs over this last weekend. Barbara was always a little self conscious about her photographic image, and I had forgotten about this studio image taken years ago. Now I’ll find a place for it to stay on a wall in the lounge room, and that, and the one at the top of the Post will also always be on display here at home.

Barbara Lang was my wonderful good lady wife, and now, she is finally at peace.

I will always love her.

Anton Lang uses the screen name of TonyfromOz, and he writes at this site, PA Pundits International on topics related to electrical power generation, from all sources, concentrating mainly on Renewable Power, and how the two most favoured methods of renewable power generation, Wind Power and all versions of Solar Power, fail comprehensively to deliver levels of power required to replace traditional power generation. His Bio is at this link.

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