health

MY STORY: ‘You’d better come Sal, Andy’s collapsed’

This extremely moving and courageous story was originally written for The Heart Foundation website in a bid to help support their life-saving work. Having read it, I asked the author, Sally, if she would be willing to share it with Mamamia readers and she most graciously agreed……

“My husband Andy absolutely lived his life to the full. He was a dedicated dad to our four children, Dom, Belle, Finn and Millie. He loved playing sport, camping and being out on the water in our boat. And he coached our children’s’ soccer team and volunteered at their preschool as maintenance officer. He was just a lovely, unassuming man with a good balance in life.

As someone said to me, ‘only the good die young’ and you feel like that if you knew Andy.

We’d been together for 20 wonderful years, married for 15 of those. And we had a great life. We built a beautiful family home, which is always filled with children. Andy and I always felt the most important thing we could do was give the kids a good place to be.

Last Easter, we spent a week camping with friends. We all had a ball, swimming, fishing and boating and Andy had been in a really good mood. But as we were packing up, he told me he was feeling exhausted. He’d been really active with the kids all week, so I just put it down to over-exertion.

The next evening, a Thursday, Andy went to play soccer at the sports centre at the end of our street. Normally, I would’ve taken the kids to watch but that night, thank goodness, I decided to stay at home. As I said goodbye to him, I asked if he felt okay. He just seemed a bit off. But he said he was fine and went off to play.

A while later, the phone rang and someone said ‘You’d better come up Sal, Andy’s collapsed.’ I thought ‘What? Andy’s never collapsed in his life.’ I thought they must have made a mistake. He just wasn’t the guy that would be in that situation. I got there in about three minutes and when I walked in, I saw him lying on the ground. Two guys were giving him CPR. But as soon as I saw his face, I knew he wasn’t coming back.

His team mates told me later that he’d been playing soccer and just had a rest on the sideline. As he was coming back on to the court, he said to his mate, ‘You go off, I’m coming on.’ And with that, he suddenly put his arms out, spun around once and dropped to the ground. His mates thought he was joking around because he could be a bit of a character. They laughed and said ‘Andy, Andy, get up’ but he didn’t move. The paramedics got there very quickly and tried everything they could, but he was gone.

At the hospital, I was told he’d died of a massive heart attack. I just couldn’t understand it. He was a fit, healthy person. Just the day before, he’d been driving a ski-boat. Andy should’ve been the last person to die of a heart attack.

All I could think was ‘how am I going to tell the kids?’ When the time came, though, something just came over me. Andy and I always chose to live life and I thought if he had been standing next to me, we’d say, ‘we’ve just got to keep going now.’

I talked to the children about warning signs and said ‘you know when we’re driving and we get an orange light as a warning sign that we have to slow down? Well, tonight something’s happened and we had no warning about it. I think Daddy’s body has been really sick and we didn’t know. We need our heart to keep working to keep the blood going around our body but tonight Daddy’s heart decided to stop beating.’ And Finn, who’s six, looked at me and said ‘he’s dead, isn’t he?’ My heart broke as I replied, ‘yes, Daddy died tonight.’

It was just unbelievable. It felt like a nightmare. One minute I was cooking dinner, the next I was signing papers with the police and telling the kids that their father wasn’t coming home. I couldn’t believe what had happened. But I knew I could go one of two ways: either I could become a basket case, which isn’t in my nature. Or I could choose life. So that’s what I did. It’s hard and awful sometimes, it’s busy and relentless, but you know, it’s the card I’ve got and it’s still life.

Probably the hardest thing is not knowing what caused Andy’s heart attack. Nobody knows what happened. One cardiologist told me ‘it might be just one of those things’, but that’s so hard to understand. That’s why the Heart Foundation’s work is so important – because people like me need answers.

The children all have their own ways of dealing with losing their Dad. Dom has a journal that he writes to Andy in. And Belle has what she calls her Dad Box, which we put things in, like his Wallabies jersey, so that any time she’s feeling sad, she just pulls out this little box. Sometimes you’ll find her with a big framed photo of Andy in bed with her. And Finn wears his old hat. I’ve tried to create a living memory of Andy, so that death is not how the children remember him.

I just try to keep things to a degree of normality. I think that’s made a big difference for the kids. They worry about the promises Andy made, or things they were looking forward to – like Dom, my 11 year old, who asked me who would teach him to shave now – and I have to say ‘we can still do those things, and there are lots of people who can help us. It’s going to be different but we can still do them.’

And I remind them how lucky they are to have had such as great dad. I tell them ‘for the best years of your life, from every photo and memory that we’ve got, you know that you had a great dad.’

There were about 1500 people at Andy’s funeral. They flew in from everywhere. A lot of people wanted to help in some way, shape or form. Many friends told me that listening to the eulogies, they realised how little they did for their community and it made them stop and think about their own lives. I think Andy’s legacy is that he’s shown people that it’s really important to give while you can.”

My thoughts and love go out to Sally and her family as well as all the other families who will be spending their first Christmas without someone they’ve loved and lost this year. It certainly puts all the ‘Christmas stress’ into stark perspective.

Would you like to make a donation to support the Heart Foundation’s life-saving work? Click here