If living an ordinary life were possible, Kathleen and John Every’s five decades together were perfectly so – until the pandemic hit.
Of all the thousands of moments that made up her parents’s lives, it’s their final laboured breaths that their daughter Alexa Every struggles to forget.
Both of Every’s parents died in institutions during the pandemic – Kathleen on Mother’s Day 2020 after a short and distressing stint in an aged care facility, and John in hospital a year later, on Christmas Eve.
Her family wasn’t alone in this unnatural grieving process. Thousands went through what Every calls “Covid-adjacent deaths” – the experience of losing a loved one not from Covid, but wrapped up in the pandemic and its associated pains.
“They didn’t die directly from Covid, but I believe they both died because of Covid,” Every says.
“Kathleen was only five months into living in a nursing home and was still adjusting,” she says. “Once they went into lockdown and we couldn’t visit her, she went into a terrible spiral of terror and confusion and died five weeks later.
“I’m sure a huge part of her very fast decline was fear and confusion because she couldn’t see her family.”
Kathleen was living with early-stage dementia when she entered aged care at the end of 2019, three months before the pandemic. Her 88-year-old husband would visit and eat lunch with her most days.
Then the facility locked down, and her lifeline – her family – was suddenly cut off from her.
“She couldn’t work out what was going on, it was all closed, as it was for thousands of people,” Every says.
“She got really agitated and angry … she was always saying ‘When are you coming?’ to my dad. She always depended on him, to be without him would have been absolutely terrifying … then she just declined before our eyes.”
Within a fortnight, the change was drastic. Eventually, Kathleen was admitted to hospital and died 10 days later.
“She couldn’t live without Dad, she didn’t know how, and died in real fear,” Every says. “I think it broke her heart.”
Kathleen’s funeral was particularly hard. Gatherings were capped at 10 and the immediate family had to remain socially distanced, 1.5 metres apart.
Every now and then, Every and her father would reach across the seat between them and gently touch each other’s fingers in comfort.
“I just wanted to hug him,” Every says.
Every often wonders how her parents’ deaths would have been different if the health system wasn’t affected by Covid and loved ones weren’t isolated from each other.
“I know in my own life a number of people who have had death in their family that feel they’ll never know,” Every says. “Their deaths were distressing in a way you think they didn’t need to be.”
John spent the whole pandemic both relieved that Kathleen didn’t have to endure it without him and guilty he hadn’t been there beside her. The couple were inseparable since they met at a church youth camp in the 1960s – Kathleen 22, and John 10 years her senior.
“It was a strange sort of grief,” Every says of her mother’s death. “We were so relieved she was no longer that distressed … we watched all the stories of people who couldn’t see their families and kept thinking ‘thank God that’s not us’.”
That’s what made John’s death, 18 months later, come as such as shock.
In the months after Kathleen passed, John had a few small bouts of time in hospital for physical ailments. In early December, he was booked into a busy Melbourne ward for what was expected to be a routine few days.
Three weeks later, on 23 December, the hospital administered final routine blood tests and asked to keep him for 24 hours to track the results. John pushed the doctor to be sent home. But he would never make it there.
“He was really a sharp and competent advocate for himself: he said three weeks is enough – it’s starting to get me down,” Every says.
“I rang the doctor and said same the thing but … they were so busy. It was terrible to see how overworked the nurses were, they were so tired.”
At 3am on Christmas Eve, Every received a call to say her dad had fallen out of bed. She still has no idea what happened (John was perfectly sound of mind) but the injuries he suffered were “catastrophic” – he was conscious but in severe pain.
Every immediately jumped in the car, but Covid protocols were strict and it was late at night. She spent crucial time running around the hospital trying to find an entry point.
“I wanted to see him before he died, and I knew he would die soon,” she says.
“We’d been texting each other a few hours before [the accident]. He still had life to live … and this was an extremely unpleasant way to die … they both died in pain in different ways.”
When she finally arrived, John had just lost consciousness. She had missed him “by a whisker”.
“It’s nobody’s fault, the system was under so much pressure,” Every says.
“So many people have had that experience. But I would’ve liked him to have seen me. It just wasn’t the way to have finished.”
The one positive – if you could call it that – was a big funeral on New Year’s Eve that made up for the small gathering of mourners a year prior.
Restrictions on numbers had lifted, and the seven grandchildren read John’s poetry aloud and played his favourite music. Everyone made sure to speak about Kathleen.
“It was so healing,” Every says. “It helped me get back to what really mattered – not the last two hours of his life, but his whole life.”
John was a stoic and good-tempered man. He spent much of his life volunteering, including for four years in Europe as a carpenter after the second world war.
After marrying Kathleen in 1965, the pair went on to have twins a year later before their third daughter, Alexa, arrived.
“No life is typical when you scratch the surface, but they lived a typical life of their era,” Every says.
Kathleen was a prep teacher and a stay-at-home mother, while John worked as a quantity surveyor. They spent their whole married lives “intertwined and very much in love”, living in a house John designed in Melbourne’s leafy suburb of Templestowe, with a back yard that backed on to the Yarra River.
Every and her siblings are only now undergoing the painful process of packing up the house of their childhood.
Her parents’ lives were of a different era. John and Kathleen took pleasure in the little things – camping together, playing classical music and writing each other Valentine’s Day cards.
“There was a simplicity out of what they wanted from life,” Every says. “I find myself feeling nostalgic for that childhood. It’s a very unusual feeling – to not have any parents for the first time.
“Working out who we are, and how we relate to each other is different now.”
Every remembers her parents – before the pandemic, lockdowns and hospital beds – the richness of their humble lives, and the beauty they found within them.
“We’ve had to reflect on their lives since they’ve died, and I’ve thought a lot about how an ordinary life is not ordinary,” she says.
“Ordinary people do really interesting things and are clever, and funny, and kind. It’s all the complexities – a relationship of over 50 years, parenting, grandparenting. Of my mum being disappointed in life sometimes, and of my dad being so caring and patient and supportive.
“Of them always being there for each other … that’s not ordinary.”
