On Tuesday 26 April I received a phone call I will never forget. “We have X-rayed your father’s lungs,” said the ICU doctor at Canberra hospital’s Covid ward. “I’m afraid the news is not good. He has 48 to 72 hours to live.”
A week earlier, my father, Jack Featherstone, who lived alone in a former schoolhouse in Braidwood, a small town in rural New South Wales halfway between Canberra and Batemans Bay, had been admitted to hospital. Within hours he’d tested positive for Covid-19. He had just celebrated his 93rd birthday.
