Absent without leave

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Ken Parish
Posted in Life, Health, Medical

Troppo readers may be wondering why I haven’t been blogging lately, after making a comeback several months ago after a long absence. The reason is that my wife Jen is in hospital dying from ovarian cancer. It’s very distressing, both for me and our daughter Jessica (not to mention Jen herself).
Jen was first diagnosed with cancer in 2017 and given 6 months to live at that time. Fortunately a great surgeon by the name of Tom Jobling, who Nicholas Gruen recommended, managed to remove nearly all the cancer. After that we kept up treatment in Darwin, with frequent trips to Melbourne. Eventually that became too exhausting, not least because most affordable flights to and from Darwin are “redeye” flights which occur late at night. Effectively you end up with jetlag after each flight.
Eventually we decided to move to Melbourne in late 2019 for treatment at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in North Melbourne. I was in some ways quite relieved about that because I was finding Darwin’s wet season heat and humidity almost impossible to bear. It’s like living permanently in a sauna bath.
We settled in St Kilda, which both of us really love. Lots of entertainment and great restaurants and cafes, on the waterfront where I can go for long bike rides around the foreshore, and very close to the Melbourne CBD by tram.
Moreover, most of Jen’s family live in Melbourne: both her parents and two of her brothers. Jen loves St Kilda too, in fact she lived in St Kilda for several years before moving to Darwin in about 1990, although she misses Darwin more than I do. I like visiting in the dry season, because my daughter and grand-daughter and many friends live there, and it’s a great climate at that time and a beautiful place.
The only downside for me is that I had to close my private law practice and stop teaching constitutional and administrative law at Charles Darwin University. In other ways that was a relief. I am almost 72 and have taught for 20 years and run a law practice since 1985 i.e. 40 years. The only thing I really miss is the money.
Anyway, Peter Mac is one of the world’s great cancer hospitals, and we owe Jen’s principal oncologist George Au Yeung more than I can describe. He is a caring doctor (not true of all) and can explain complex concepts in ways we could understand.
Jen has been on more clinical trials than Peter Mac has ever experienced, but time was always going to run out, and it almost has. She is now in palliative care at Peter Mac, and unlikely to come out. Hopefully she will make it to her 63rd birthday on 19 August, but she certainly won’t make Christmas.
At the moment I am in respite care at Regis in Brighton, because I haven’t been coping at all well, partly through grief and partly because of my autism. I have “meltdowns” when something really unexpected happens. I have also been having frequent falls (albeit without serious injury), and fairly frequently lock myself out of the house.  I also seem to have had a small stroke at some point according to scans.  That might be contributing to the problems with balance. Even though Jen’s death is not unexpected, it doesn’t make it any easier to manage.
I probably won’t be writing any more posts on Troppo until well after Jen’s death.
Finally, there is a blog meet-up scheduled for Monday 25 August at 12.30pm at Sorsi and Morsi, an affordable Italian café in at the corner of Barkley and Blessington Streets, St Kilda. If you live in Melbourne we would love to see you. In the good old days there was quite frequent blog meet-ups, but social media no longer seems as social as it once was. Maybe we can revive it.

11 Comments

  1. Ken Parish
    August 8, 2025

    If you are reading this please note that I won't be able to post new articles until someone can fix my login which stopped working while I was at dinner. But at least I can post comments. This is very frustrating. I was having a lovely time writing articles. With a bit of luck my daughter Jessica might be able to fix it. If not, hopefully there is a computer shop in Brighton.

  2. Ken Parish
    August 9, 2025

    UPDATE - My daughter managed to fix it so I am back on the air. Mind you, no-one has commented yet. A bit disappoining but such is life. Troppo discussion doesn't seem to be anywhere near as dynamic as it once was. I wonder why.

  3. Chris J Lloyd
    August 11, 2025

    So sorry to hear of your situation Ken. My life is better for your effort of setting up CT with Nick. I have turned off my automatic notification for CT and only saw your post when I got notification about my own post. But the blogosphere is much narrower now. Tiktok rules. Surely you can condense everything you want to say into a 15s video?!

    OK, not the time to make light of anything.

    I will do my best to make the lunch. Nick, do you have contacts of Troppo stalwarts to advertise this event?

  4. Nicholas Gruen
    August 12, 2025

    Hi Ken, I'm in the same boat as Chris. I didn't get updated by your post - and I didn't opt out of them, so somehow I think the updating function isn't working. But I've already got the lunch in my calendar. I did email you back from a recent text you sent, but you presumably missed it, which is hardly surprising given what you've had on your mind. Please give Jen my regards next time you see her and I'll see you and hopefully Chris and others on the 25th.

  5. Nicholas Gruen
    August 12, 2025

    Yes, but a lot of the old contributors were not from Melbourne. I'll post on my newsletter and see who I can find in the emails of contributors.

  6. Ken Parish
    August 12, 2025

    Thanks Nicholas. You're right I didn't see the correspondence. I no longer check my CDU mailbox, in fact it will soon cease to exist. When I retired I took a 3 year adjunct appointment but have chosen not to seek to renew it. I'll see you on 25/8.

    Returning to the subject of this post, a conversation yesterday with another "inmate" delivered some much needed perspective. Respite care helps in that regard at least , as well as providing an enforced opportunity for quiet reflection. I'm also learning more about the respite care system. Hugh is a bloke around my age, a retired accountant. He "lost" his wife a year or so ago. He woke up one morning and found his wife of 50 years dead in bed beside him. I wonder which is worse: sudden unexpected loss versus the opposite. Conscious anticipatory grief has been a daily companion.

    Turning from the personal to the more general, the clientele of this Regis facility consists of a mix of respite care and longer term term patients needing "assisted living" (a term used by the industry itself), and people who are both physically and mentally able. They use the facility as a retirement village where your home is a single bedroom with en-suite bathroom. Activities include yoga movies music and gentle exercise classes. No doubt the presence of this three way community is a commercial necessity. Regis delivers an excellent product, but it's an uneasy blend. Some of the longer-term term patients. Some of the assisted living patients exhibit strange behaviour, to put it gently. Arguably they should be in a psychiatric hospital, although the decisions of their in-laws to opt for communal assisted living rather than a full- blown psychiatric institution. However, for those

  7. Ken Parish
    August 12, 2025

    Oops . Accidentally hit the publish button ...who are both physically and mentally present. It's sub-optimal.

  8. Nicholas Gruen
    August 13, 2025

    Thanks Ken, See you on the 25th.

  9. Ken Parish
    August 15, 2025

    I thought you said you had another booking. Glad we will now see you there.

  10. Jacques Chester
    August 22, 2025

    Terrible news. I wish I could come visit and join the get together.

    While I don't move in blogospheric circles these days, I do miss the hey day. Now it's hot takes. And that's what we're left with. I mean LinkedIn is such a shit parade. I go onto Facebook maybe once every 6 months. I quit twitter because I started getting transphobic crap pushed at me.

    Anyhow. I want you to know that it was honour to be custodian and to have been part of the great Club Troppo story. (Sorry I was a nauseating libertarian during my Con law classes, btw).

    I hope you know that people still like you and care about you and yours.

  11. Don Arthur
    August 23, 2025

    Hi Ken

    I'm sorry to hear about Jen & the news about your own health. I heard about this post yesterday from Nicholas.