“They were all saying she was coming home,” Bec Rees says. Her mother, Sue, had gone into hospital in Melbourne with a burst eardrum. She also had cancer.
Then she got Covid. She didn’t come home.
Sue Rees was 74, and when she died on 8 January she became one of more than 1,500 deaths reported in Australia in this latest surge of the global pandemic.
As Australia’s death toll grows, we know very little about who has died. Daily press conferences reveal the rising number, often accompanied by the disclaimer that those who died had “underlying conditions”.
The director and chief executive of the Burnet Institute, Prof Brendan Crabb, says that sort of language risks dividing people into the “ones we care about and the ones we don’t”.
“A very large proportion of us do have an underlying condition – heart conditions, diabetes … even if that wasn’t the case, does it matter?”
Sue would have hated being a statistic, her daughter says.
“She always hated taking off her clothes, her pearls, her brightly coloured tops … if you dress the same as everyone else, they stop talking to you as an individual with a personality and start treating you like a two-dimensional cardboard cutout.
“She got caught up in a system where she was just treated like a number and no one could see who she was. When you’re in those hospital gowns you just become one of thousands. Faceless, soulless, you’re just a nobody.”
Sue Rees was not a nobody. She was the sort of person who saw Les Misérables six times – and convinced Bec to gatecrash the afterparty with her.
She was the kindest soul around, her daughter says, but incredibly competitive. When it came to any sort of game she always played to win. Even Connect Four.
She was a flowergirl at her daughter’s wedding.
Once, Bec broke Sue out of hospital to see Hugh Jackman live in concert. She sang and danced for hours, Bec says, “with a Picc in her arm” to deliver her chemotherapy drugs. Sue got back, washed off the blood and hummed a Jackman song.
Sue had lymphoma, a cancer that starts in the lymphatic system. She was undergoing chemotherapy in the oncology ward at Epworth Richmond. In early December, there was talk of her being discharged. A week later, she caught Covid from a staff member and was transferred to the Alfred hospital.
Rees held her mother’s hand as she died, after being “100%” convinced she would come home.
“All the feedback from the doctors, her nurses, her vital signs, they all were saying she’s coming home despite all the comorbidities,” Bec says.
“It feels heartless and faceless for all of the victims when [other victims] have stories given to them, photos shown of them, they were memorialised, they were remembered. These Covid victims had a face and a story, and right now they’re just a statistic.”
Sue’s memorial was at One Tree Hill in Tremont, in the Dandenong Ranges, which bears the same name as the spot on Hamilton Island where Bec got married. Sue declared her time there “the time of her life”.
“She has been taken from you sooner than she would have otherwise been, had it not been for Covid-19,” celebrant Jacqui Chaplin told the mourners, as she invited them to both grieve and celebrate Sue’s life.
They heard about a childhood accident, Sue’s love of tennis, her marriage (after it ended she declared she had “downsized” both her home and husband), work, children and grandchildren. She was a “cool mum” and a “great cook” who became a personal carer.
Then she needed care, after she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Over 10 years she had 18 specialists and more than 50 surgeries, but she survived. Until Covid.
Bec has taken off on a road trip up the east coast. She’s thinking about Cairns next, or Palm Cove, or somewhere else. And, of course, she’s thinking about her mum.
Asked what first comes into her mind, she says: “She was the kind of person that would go to any length to help others, protect others, support others, and make sure that they were OK before worrying about herself.
“She was so much more than a statistic.”
