Walk a mile in someone else's shoes, they say, but how can you even begin to do that when that someone spends three days a week hooked up to a dialysis machine? How can you even imagine what that feels like unless you've gone through the same agony?
When John Burke wanted to divert himself from his dialysis sessions which he had to undergo three times a week to stay alive, he found in me a willing listener when he phoned me several times, on some days as often as five times. But there were occasions when I was elsewhere on the property, and I would arrive back at the house totally out of breath, only to find John at the other end again, wisecracking or wanting to reminisce about our time together at the ANZ Bank almost sixty years ago. I knew it helped him break up the tedium of removing unwanted waste from his blood, but it got mine boiling at times which is why I asked him to limit his calls to perhaps just two a day. Unwisely, as it turned out, because he took it badly and I never heard from him again.
Until yesterday when I received this email from another retired ANZer:
John Burke, as head-ledgerkeeper at the ANZ Bank in Canberra Civic, had been my immediate boss during my first two years as ledgerkeeper from 1965 to 1967 during which we were also "inmates" in the same boarding-house. He was again my boss as accountant of the Kingston branch where I worked as a teller for another nine months or so after I had come back from South Africa and before I went to New Guinea.
We met again after over forty years at the ANZ Banking Group Retired Officers' Club's Christmas lunch in 2010, followed by several meetings at my old watering hole, the Blues Point Hotel in McMahons Point, and the nearby Kirribilli Club, and continued to stay in touch by telephone until that fateful out-of-breath call after which I never heard from him again. How I now wished that I had held my breath instead of being out of it!
Rest in Peace, John! You have left your mark on my life, and there'll always be a place on the South Coast where you will be remembered!
