For The Love of Willie
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister of Cheltenham Church of Christ Victoria. This Church had the reputation of being a very large and alive Church. But that was a mirage. The reality was quite different as this young country parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister has some real surprises.
When we moved into the Manse at the Cheltenham Church of Christ at the beginning of January 1966, I asked the Church Secretary if there were any people who were ill as I would like to visit them on my first day within the parish. I wanted to send a message that I had come as their pastor and I wanted to visit them and care for them especially in time of illness. I thought if I visited some of the aged shut-ins and people in hospitals on my very first day, even before our boxes were unloaded, it might give to the people a message that we cared for them and we were there to be beside them in time of need. The Church Secretary, Graham Hilbig was a good fellow with a real care for the members of the church. He didn’t have to look up any pastoral care list.
He knew by heart every one in the congregation who was going through any time of personal difficulty. He mentioned names of several frail aged people who were confined to home or to the nursing home, and then mentioned a couple who had been in hospital just recently. And then he said “It would be a good idea if you went and saw Willie Brown. He’s still in hospital but should be coming home any day now. He had a bad fall here at the church a week ago. He fell down the steps and cut his head badly. His wife Jean was terribly upset.” I found out which hospital he was in and, putting on my suit coat, headed off to visit that hospital and half a dozen other people in the community before coming back to continue unpacking our belongings.
I knew the Royal Melbourne Hospital well because I had worked in the slums of Melbourne for eight years and I was in and out of the hospital every week. I just knew where he would be – in the accident ward – and so without seeking any information from the front desk of the hospital I went immediately to the appropriate ward. But he wasn’t there. Nor had he been there. This was most unusual. A serious accident case – and yet not in the accident ward. I went back to the Inquiry Desk and sought information. The lady behind the desk said “Mr. Willie Brown of Sandringham? Yes. He’s been here all this week. You’ll find him on N6West.” As I rode up in the lift I thought “N6 West? Isn’t that the neurological ward? Wasn’t this the place where they did tests on the brain?” The Sister indicated the room and when I entered his wife was sitting beside him. I introduced myself as the new minister who had only arrived that day and had wanted to come and pray with them. Jean Brown was a very ordinary kind of woman with a rather sharp voice. I asked how Willie was getting on. Jean replied “Oh, Willie’s OK. It’s just that he’s so careless. He fell down the church steps, you know, and that’s why he’s got this terrible split in his forehead. Stop dribbling dear!”
She quickly grasped his handkerchief and wiped both sides of his mouth and continued “Oh, he’s getting so careless. Willie dropped one of my best plates the other week and smashed it to pieces. It was in our wedding set and I’ve tried hard over the years with three children never to break a piece of that set and yet right in the kitchen he just dropped it on the floor. He’s always knocking things over. I have just been telling him that when he comes home and his head gets better, he will just have to pick himself up and make sure he doesn’t go on like he’s been going on. The way he fell over in church you would think he was drunk.”
Poor Willie. He just seemed to lie there and take it all in as if he’d been used to taking it in over many years. Willie came home from hospital a day or two afterwards. Apparently the doctors had run some tests but the results of those tests wouldn’t be known for a while. Soon after he arrived home I went to visit them. The memory of that visit is very clear in my mind. I visited them – I have the date before me – in January 1966, in their War Service home constructed in one of the poorer parts of Sandringham. Thereafter, for the next six months like a flight of swallows are the dates recorded of my weekly visit to their home. And then there is something written in July against the family’s name. I visited him first on 24th January 1966 and I buried on 22nd July 1966.
What had happened in those six months?
I hardly got to know Willie at all in those early days of ministry and yet I can remember him as vividly at this moment as I have ever shared any man’s life. I have before me my diary with my notes about Willie and also a card with three holes punched in it where it fitted into my Funeral Book. I had typed on both sides of the card my eulogy presented at his funeral. I will just take a few words from the eulogy so that you might see the background of this man.
“Willie Brown spent his early years battling against poverty and hardship. He was brought up on a farm in the Wimmera. They were tough and difficult days of the Depression. Willie was forced to leave home as a teenager to earn an income to keep himself. There was a series of bad drought years which meant work was hard to get and young Willie left to make his own way in the world. Later he was to share-farm at Sea Lake and there he quite successfully developed his farming skills. He farmed in partnership with his brother Frank in Western Australia but returned to Victoria to marry Jean and once more settle on the land. It was just after their marriage that they started to attend the Sea Lake Church of Christ. They became regular attenders and Willie was baptised as a adult. He loved his church and during all the years he farmed in the Sea Lake area he was a solid worker within the life of the Sea Lake Church of Christ. They came down to Sandringham sixteen years ago and then began their membership in the Cheltenham Church of Christ. Willie had taken a job with the Agricultural Division of the CSIRO at Sea Lake where he used his practical skills to implement some of the scientific experiments in agriculture that were being carried on at the agricultural experimental station. He had been throughout all of his life a regular and vital member of our church.
During World War Two Willie saw four years in the army. He served in the Middle East and later on in Borneo with the Second AIF. He was also an active member in the Masonic Lodge and members of his craft are here to pay their respects to him today. For these past sixteen years Willie has worked in the CSIRO. In that agricultural research station there are many scientists seeking to devise new and better agricultural products. Those scientists worked out on paper what ought to be done, and Willie was the man who did it in the field. He did all of the ordinary tasks well. That’s why he has been held in such high respect by his workmates.
Just over nine months ago Willie noticed that his hands were not doing what he wanted them to do. It was six months ago that I first met him when he had fallen here on the steps of this church.”
That much I had discovered about Willie’s life but I should stop what I said at his funeral at this point to tell you how I then came to know Willie’s problem. At that stage he had not been telling his wife of the problems he was facing – that his hand was not doing what it should do and that his foot was not lifting when it should. That was why he missed his footing and fell down the steps of the church.
During my second week I heard that he had been sent home from hospital and so drove around to visit them at their very ordinary War Service home built in Sandringham. Like most of the houses in the street, the garden was fairly plain and basic but neat and trim – just what I came to expect in all of those War Service homes where Diggers and their families had been settled after the war.
Willie had only been home a day or so from the hospital and as yet he hadn’t been told the results of the tests. I knocked on the door quietly – I figured that perhaps he could be resting or asleep and I didn’t want to wake him. There was no response. I knocked a second time, and this time a little louder. And then I heard from inside the house some sounds of movement. I waited at the door. I could see through the sand-blasted glass panels on the front door that there was some movement inside the house and then all of a sudden – an almighty crash! The crash was followed by a terrible smashing sound. I wondered what was happening. And then another smash and part of a wheelchair shattered the frosted glass of the front door. I looked through the broken glass and there was Willie lying on the floor of the hallway with the wheelchair up-ended, it’s handle sticking through the plate glass door. There was glass everywhere. I quickly decided I should go round the back and as I was going up the side there was a terrible scream from inside the house. It was Jean who apparently had come in from the back yard where she had been hanging clothes on the line. I walked in the backyard and called out “Hullo – it’s Gordon Moyes – do you mind if I come in? Is everything all right? Can I help?” And by this time I was standing at the door between their kitchen and the hall. Jean was kneeling on the ground surrounded by glass, helping Willie up. “It’s you is it?” looking at me. “Look what Willie’s gone and done. He smashed my mother’s mirror! We’ve had that mirror since my mother died. It’s always been there on that hallway table and look what Willie’s done.” I helped her lift Willie to his feet and on to a lounge chair.
Jean kept up her statements “Why did you go to the door. You could have called me. You’re just so clumsy Willie.” And with that she just burst into tears. Jean could take no more. I moved over to her and took her in my arms and held her while she sobbed and sobbed.
Eventually we were seated together in the lounge room – the broken mirror and glass in the hallway, the wheelchair still up-ended, the three-legged hall table lying on it’s side. She had sobbed out all of her tension. Willie started to talk, slowly but quite firmly “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened, but as I was reaching for the handle of the door the chair just went from under me hitting the table and I fell from it. My feet were caught up in the front of it and somehow when I went down it came back and smashed into the door. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to greet you this way Mr. Moyes. I’ve been a problem to Jean for some time now. I don’t know what’s happening. My mind is as clear as ever and I know what I want to do but I just can’t do it. My hands haven’t been doing what I’ve been telling them to do. I noticed it first at work. I began to drop things and not hold on to them properly. Sometimes I would squeeze a pair of shears to cut some grains and the fingers just wouldn’t close. And sometimes my feet just wouldn’t go and do what I would tell them. I would try to lift my foot up and the toes would just hang down to the ground. That’s how I came to fall at church when I tripped on the stairs. My mind is as good as ever but my body doesn’t seem to be working. I don’t know. The doctors are puzzled. They’ve been doing some tests.”
Later than afternoon I helped Jean clear up the broken glass, at the same time reassuring her that we would stand beside her and Willie while they received the news about the tests.
I arranged for one of the men in my church – a carpenter but a very good general handyman – to come around and replace the glass in the front door late that afternoon. I was quite depressed about Willie Brown’s condition, mainly because I had read only a year or two earlier the biography of Dr. Sangster, the famous Methodist preacher in London. He had died from some disease which slowly robbed his muscles. It was the first time I had ever read of that disease. What was it? It wasn’t Parkinson’s Disease – it was some kind of muscular atrophy, a disease where the muscles just didn’t get the message from the brain and slowly his body refused to function. From what I read of his death it was very similar to the problem that Willie Brown had in Sandringham.
The results of the tests came through only a day or so afterwards and the local doctor, Dr. A.A. Gray, came and talked with Willie and Jean and told them of a word they had not heard before but which was going to hang like a big dark cloud over the rest of Willie’s life. The doctors at the Royal Melbourne said that Willie had all the symptoms of Motor Neurone Disease. Jean rang to tell me. I then started a series of weekly visits to Willie. He did not recover and the disease spread very quickly. Every week I would visit them and on Sunday afternoon one of the lovely Elders of my church, Campbell Strong, and I would call upon Willie and Jean straight after lunch with some bread and wine from the Sunday morning Communion Service and I would lead a brief Communion Service, Bible reading and prayers with him in their lounge room. I did this each week until six months later he died.
The end came very quickly and Willie died at home. Gradually his body refused to work. His hands and feet first, and then arms and legs. Gradually the other muscles in his body refused to work, including his bowels and digestive system. Eventually his chest would not move as our chest does, opening and closing the lungs to enable us to breathe. He was now only breathing very small amounts of air and oxygen was being fed through a tube down his nose.
He was always sitting upright because he was now unable to reject any spit that would gather in his throat. It was just so easy for a person to drown in his own sputum. Late one night on the 20th July of that year Rose their daughter rang me and said simply “Can you come. We think Dad is slipping.” I sat with Rose and Jean around his bed. There was the quiet hiss from the oxygen bottle. There was a towel over the lamp beside the bed to shade the light from his eyes. There was perspiration on his brow which Jean mopped every minute or so. The chest and lungs were not working now and he couldn’t swallow. Even a little liquid to his lips to moisten them and his dry mouth could be a real danger to him. He couldn’t swallow or clear his throat, speak or even move his mouth in silent words. He just looked. Slowly he slipped from this life. Then it appeared as if he wanted to say something. I don’t know how we knew, but Jean sat up and drew her face closer to his “What is it love? What are you trying to say? Goodnight? No? Goodbye?” Yes, that’s what he was trying to say – goodbye. I think I detected the faintest of smiles. Willie couldn’t even close his eyes when he said goodbye, he just simply continued to look. And then there was no more. Jean knew that he had died. His eyes were still open and the oxygen bottle was still hissing. She looked at me and in a matter of fact way said “Shall I turn the oxygen off?” I said “No – leave the oxygen on. Let me have a prayer with Willie and you and then I think you should ring Doctor Gray.” We prayed together and committed Willie to his Lord and Jean and her two daughters to God’s care. Doctor Gray came a few moments later and closed Willie’s eyelids.
The church was packed for his funeral and representative groups were there from the CSIRO, from the Masonic Lodge, and from the RSL. There were many who can pay tribute to the contribution Willie Brown made as a friend, workmate and colleague.
I tell you this story for one simple reason. I have thought of Willie Brown and those like him and wondered how we could do more to help them. But like many other problems facing people there have never been enough resources. As the years have gone by I have been able to see centres of care established for people suffering from cancer, palliative care centres, special hospitals, wards for people suffering from mental and emotional illnesses, psychiatric services developed, and a whole range of facilities for people from various kinds of disease. In recent days Wesley Mission has opened a new Spinal Care Unit for people suffering from quadriplegia, and paraplegia and from many of the paralyses that come from damage to the spinal cord. We have been working closely with the Parkinsons Association and with people suffering from Alzheimers Disease. Our palliative care unit looks after those people who are dying from inoperable tumours and those whose days are coming to an end because of cancer. Currently we are working on a big new development to help people paralysed because of road accidents, and we established a Huntingdons Disease unit in Dundas. Wesley Mission has been in the forefront in these recent years to help people suffering from these dreaded diseases.
In more recent days we have become active in establishing a major centre for the whole of New South Wales for people suffering from motor neurone disease.
Willie Brown and his death have never left my mind and if I could do anything for the Willie Browns of New South Wales I was determined to do so and with the Hospital Board and the support of Wesley Mission we developed a centre for motor neurone disease.
A few years ago, the Patron of the International Alliance of Motor Neurone Disease Associations, the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, came from London to visit us at The Lottie Stewart Hospital and spend some time speaking with people who have the same disease as Willie Brown.
Motor neurone disease is a progressive disease of the nervous system, where eventually all the motor muscles are affected meaning there is an inability to walk or to grasp or to hold or to swallow or to breathe. There are many people like Willie Brown in New South Wales. More than a thousand of them have this disease in some stage or other. There is no known cure.
When Sarah Ferguson visited our wards and met with a dozen or so people in their wheelchairs I thought of Willie Brown and knew that he was pleased.
That night in my study I spent some time writing up my journal and looking out of the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road, that wide intersection that was dominated by the lovely white Church with the high white tower noting down the events of another day as a suburban minister.
GORDON MOYES