Let’s talk about death
The look on his face told her everything. Vashti Whitfield had rushed to Auckland where her rapidly deteriorating husband, Andy, was receiving acupuncture treatment designed to boost strength in cancer patients. But the Welsh-born actor, who had steadfastly refused to consider the possibility of dying, had now taken a turn for the worse, and Vashti was determined to bring him back to Sydney to die. Although she’d ridden an unimaginable roller-coaster of emotions over the 18 months since Andy’s diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, nothing could prepare her for seeing her once-robust husband, the star of US TV series Spartacus, peacefully surrender to his final scene. Death, the inevitable fate that most of us spend our lives denying, was now claiming him at the age of just 39. And bearing witness to that remains one of the most powerful experiences of Vashti’s life.
“When I arrived in Auckland, he was sitting there in our friends’ home,” she recalls. “He was just staring out the window, smiling. It was in that moment that I knew he’d started to die.
“All of a sudden he lost control of his bodily functions, which we knew was the ultimate thing that would happen. As I tried with my own body weight to get him into the bathroom to clean him up, he took a massive breath and flaked out, and I felt
