118 – How Do You Mend a Broken Heart? Part 2: 12 December 2024

I lent my car free of charge to Anne Ryan when she arrived in Adelaide in December 2019 and she still had my car in March 2020 when Covid prevented all normal international travel to or from Australia.  Because she could not return to Ireland, I permitted Anne to keep the car until she could return to Ireland.  Anne still had my car in January 2021.

Early in 2020, Anne bought a second hand wooden table made of jarrah for her small garden.  Jarrah is an Australian native hardwood tree.  The table needed minor repairs and the removal of years of stains and dirt.  I promised to do fix the table, but did not have the time to do this before June 2020.

This photo shows the jarrah table.  The tape measure across the table shows that it was 46 inches (1,168.4 millimetres) in diameter.  The table was difficult to repair because jarrah is an immensely dense timber.

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To prepare for the promised work, I purchased an electric sander and an electric drill at my own cost.  Anne never did ask about the cost and she never did offer to refund those costs.  As the chest restoration project progressed, I also purchased all of the sandpaper discs at my own cost.  Once again, Anne never asked about these costs and never did offer to refund them. For reasons which I will explain shortly, I had to purchase dozens of sandpaper discs and these costs kept escalating.

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I started work on the jarrah table on Saturday 6 June 2020.  I continued working on the table on Thursday 11 and Friday 26 June and finally finished it on Saturday 10 July - the day after we found out that Margaret was certain to die.

This table summarises the work I did to repair Anne Ryan’s jarrah table.

Date	Hours of Work Performed
Saturday 6 June	2 ½ hours sanding wooden table
Thursday 11 June	2 hours restoring wooden table
Friday 26 June	2 ½ hours sanding wooden table
Saturday 11 July	4 hours sanding wooden table

 

The jarrah table looked beautiful once I had finished restoring it.  Anne still has it at her unit in Glenelg.

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Anne also bought a small second hand wooden chest.  It had been made decades earlier as a home carpentry project.  The inside of the chest was lined with tin.  The inside and outside of the chest had been painted with varnish which now needed to be removed. 

I promised to renovate the chest as well as the jarrah table. 

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Unluckily for me, restoring the wooden chest was an extremely difficult job and it was much harder than I had thought it would be.  The varnish on the chest was “easy wax” - a mixture of shoe polish and kerosene which had been heated to liquidise it and then been painted on the chest.  Easy wax is extremely difficult to remove.  When sandpaper discs in a sanding tool come into contact with easy wax, the heat of the sanding disc melts the easy wax.  The easy wax then coats the sanding disc and the disc must be replaced.  Stripping the easy wax required dozens of sandpaper discs and many hours of gruelling work.

The photo above shows the chest shortly after I started work on it.

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Most of the work I did on the chest took place after Margaret’s diagnosis.  Not only was the work physically gruelling but the circumstances in which I did the work were grim.  My deadly coughing increased dramatically after I started work on the chest.  Wood dust settled in my lungs constantly despite the masks I wore to try and keep it out.  During the final weeks of work on the chest, I thought the coughing and the frequent breath attacks had a good chance of killing me.  Nevertheless, I grimly continued with the work.  I had to finish the work because I had started it.  Unless I finished, the chest would be fit only for the rubbish dump.

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This table summarises the work I did to repair Anne Ryan’s wooden chest in July 2020.

Date	Hours of Work Performed
Thursday 16 July	1 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Friday 17 July	1 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Wednesday 22 July	2 ¼ hours sanding wooden chest
Thursday 23 July	2 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Friday 24 July	2 ¼ hours sanding wooden chest
Saturday 25 July	2 ¾ hours sanding wooden chest
Wednesday 29 July	2 ¾ hours sanding wooden chest
Friday 31 July	2 ¼ hours sanding wooden chest

 

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This table summarises the work I did to repair Anne Ryan’s wooden chest in August 2020.

Date	Hours of Work Performed
Saturday 1 August	2 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Tuesday 4 August	2 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Wednesday 5 August	3 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Saturday 15 August	3 hours sanding wooden chest
Tuesday 18 August	2 ¾ hours sanding wooden chest
Wednesday 19 August	2 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Tuesday 25 August	3 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Thursday 27 August	3 ½ hours sanding wooden chest

 

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This table summarises the work I did to repair Anne Ryan’s wooden chest in September and October 2020.

Date	Hours of Work Performed
Wednesday 9 September	4 hours carpentry work on wooden chest
Wednesday 23 September	2 hours carpentry work on wooden chest
Thursday 24 September	1 hour carpentry work on wooden chest
Saturday 26 September	1 ½ hours carpentry work on wooden chest
Friday 2 October	1 hour carpentry work on wooden chest

 

  

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This is a photo of the chest taken shortly after I had finished restoring it. 

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This is another photo of the chest after I had finished restoring it.

 

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No matter how much work I did, I could not eliminate some awful facts.  Margaret was still dying and I was still broken hearted.  Doing all the woodwork did little to help mend my broken heart.  it simply helped fill in some empty hours.

Helping Anne Ryan certainly contributed to my own severe bad health and doing this restoration work simply gave Margaret more reasons to worry about my health as well as her own.

Doing the work for Anne Ryan was futile on so many levels - including the complete indifference of Anne Ryan to the help I was giving her.