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When Justin Middling slumped to the floor during a university lecture, his peers thought he was mucking around.
The 33-year old was dying.
By the time his friends realised he was not joking, by the time paramedics navigated the stairs to the lecture theatre and by the time they got him to hospital, he was brain dead.
”They call it sudden adult death syndrome, where a seemingly perfectly fine young person drops dead,” says his sister, Bronwen Fallens.
Eleven days later, Fallens and her mother made the decision to turn off his life support.
”We were lucky we got to be there. I held him in my arms as he passed and had his favourite music playing,” she says.
The reactions of her friends to the death were varied, she says. Some rallied around her. Others made comments the 39-year-old says shocked and hurt her.
”Some people lose babies,” one friend said.
”At least he got to 33.”
Another friend compared the death to going through a divorce. Others said nothing at all.
”They’re scared of catching it, your misery,” Fallens says. ”They think if they get too close to it, it will rub off on them. I ended up shedding the friends who couldn’t understand.”
Grief can be like having a mental illness, she says.
”I was in a world of misery. You’re not yourself. Some people seem to think you should snap out of it and they judge you for grieving for so long.”
When her father died with dementia a year later, aged 74, Fallens says she received an entirely different reaction. Some people didn’t even send flowers or a card.
”It is as though you’re not expected to be sad because he was old and sick and it was for the best, people say. But he was my father. I have lifelong memories of him from when I was a baby, long before he got sick.” Continue reading
Sources
Melissa Davey is a Sydney Morning Herald journalist
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