“Our last days together were the sweetest”
On Thursday May 16, 2019, as her soulmate, Bob Hawke, was struggling to breathe, consumed with pneumonia, Blanche d’Alpuget lay by her husband’s side, eager to soothe his distress, when something strange happened. “I started to get the pneumonia and he started to get better. His face became pink again and he was feeling brighter,” says Blanche, holding back her tears. Not wanting to make Bob worse again, and feeling decidedly crook herself, Blanche jumped in the car to consult her acupuncturist.
“She took my pulse and said, ‘How did you get here?’. I said, ‘I drove’. She quickly replied, ‘I’ll drive you home, you’ve got no pulse, what have you been doing?’ I said, ‘I’ve been lying down beside my husband who’s dying’. She said, ‘you mustn’t do that, you are giving all the energy of your body to him’.”
Back at their house in Sydney’s Northbridge, Blanche returned to Bob, the man she first met in Jakarta in 1970 and ultimately married in 1995. Twenty-four hours earlier when Bob had been poleaxed with excruciating pain in his torso, the doctor had told Blanche, “this was probably the beginning of the end” for the 89-year-old. But could Blanche have delivered a reprieve for the love of her life?
Alas, no. “I went back and I didn’t lie down beside him, we just held hands ... This was two hours before he died,” she says, her voice shaking a little. Bob’s close friend, politician Craig Emerson, and his partner, Tracey Winters, were also at the former Prime Minister’s bedside when, at 5.04pm, he took his last breath.
“Craig placed two fingers on his neck and shook his head. With astonishment, the three of us felt intense uplifting joy,” writes Blanche in, a compilation of her Hawke works. It includes an update of her political study, and a new final section filling in his last nine years.
