The love, she would later confide, was many rungs above the “fiery, very physical and sexual love” they’d enjoyed in previous decades. “That love is so, so strong and so binding, an electric force of some kind, but love near death is on a subtler and more refined plane. Refined in feeling and refined in texture and refined in colour. If sexual love is a deep red, our love was the beautiful iridescent violet of the rainbow.”

Women wept in the streets at the appearance of a “suntanned god made four inches taller by a beehive of meticulously whipped silver hair”.

Love was important to Hawke, perhaps even more than it is to most people. He’d been the adored child of doting parents, their love sharpened when an older brother died aged 17 in 1939 during a meningitis outbreak in South Australia. He described his childhood to me as being “such a place of love and happiness. I didn’t want to be anywhere else.”

Such was his connection with the Australian public that even before he became prime minister, women wept in the streets at the appearance of a “suntanned god made four inches taller by a beehive of meticulously whipped silver hair”. His former attorney-general would wryly tell me, “We were in the presence of someone who a lot of people perceived as God.”

Folded together in bed, Hawke and Blanche, who held firm to the belief that a soul is only taken when your earthly purpose is complete – even if, sometimes, the cosmic order is upended with a murder, say – agreed that after 47 years they’d finally reached the summit of their love. “It’s impossible to love you more than I do now,” he told Blanche.

There was one concession to death. Two weeks earlier, Hawke had summoned the then Auxiliary Bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, Terence Brady, famous for his work with the poor and vulnerable, to see if Brady could convince him that there was an afterlife.

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He couldn’t.

Hawke’s last night on Earth, Wednesday, May 15, 2019, began with a dinner of butter chicken served in the house’s galley kitchen, Hawke and Blanche eating in front of the 7pm ABC News. The meal had been prepared by their housekeeper, former Chinese national Vicky Ma, who was a student living in Australia in 1989 when protesters were bulldozed by tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Hawke, who was the prime minister at the time, had been shocked by cables from the Australian embassy in Beijing describing the bloodshed, and tearfully announced on television that any Chinese legally in Australia would be offered asylum.

Ma, one of 42,000 Chinese nationals in Australia, never went back to China. Twenty-one years later, when an employment agency sent her for a housekeeping job at a five-storey mansion in Sydney’s Northbridge and Blanche mentioned whom she’d be working for, Ma begged for the job.

“I’m one of his children,” she said through her daughter, who acted as interpreter.

Now, on the evening before he died, Hawke finished his dinner then suddenly stood up, stumbled into the adjacent sitting room and, on all fours, vomited and screamed, “I’m in agony! This is killing me!”

Blanche told him, “I know! You’re dying.”

She’d later confide that Hawke had always boasted of having no fear of death and, referencing the anguish of watching her own mother die, she remembered thinking, “Wait until you get there. It’s not easy.”

Hawke held the left side of his stomach just beneath the rib cage, a right-angle scar indicating where his spleen had been removed after a motorcycle crash in 1947. Blanche wondered if the angel of death had returned for its final triumphant strike.

Morning came and Blanche got up, attended to familiar chores, then went back and lay beside him throughout the afternoon.

Hawke’s doctor, fortuitously at dinner at a nearby restaurant, was summoned. He guessed that an ulcer had burst. Drugs were administered, morphine for the pain as well as the Midazolam to calm him down. Blanche lay down next to her husband for the night, noting the telltale rattle of pneumonia coming on, a common side-effect of opioids.

Morning came and Blanche got up, attended to familiar chores, then went back and lay beside him throughout the afternoon. If death was close, she would help ease him to the other side.

Long ago, she’d embraced Pascal’s Wager, the philosophical argument of French mathematician Blaise Pascal that given the uncertainty of an afterlife, it’s better to believe in heaven and live happily than be an atheist and live without hope.

Slowly, a warm colour returned to Hawke’s skin and his breathing began to ease; a calm enveloped him. The housekeeper, relieved, said to Blanche, “He’s OK! He’s going to live!” and left the house.

At 4pm, Blanche was confident enough in Hawke’s health to keep her appointment with a local acupuncturist. She stretched out on the examination bench and the therapist felt pulse points on her wrist, a major diagnostic tool in acupuncture. Pulse qualities – fast, slow, strong, weak, thin or slippery – indicate various maladies.

“What have you been doing!” asked the therapist.

“Why?” Blanche said.

“You’ve got no pulses.”

Blanche explained that she’d been lying with her husband on his deathbed. “You’re dying,” the therapist told her. “You’ve given him all your energy. You’ll die if you do that. You must not lie beside him. You can hold his hand, that’s all.”

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When Blanche returned to the house shortly before five, the pink that had come into Hawke’s face had gone and his breathing had deteriorated. She sat beside him and held his hand. Also there was a dear friend from the Labor Party – Craig Emerson – and his partner Tracey Winters.

At five minutes past five, with the bedroom flooded with the pale yellow light of an autumnal sunset, Hawke died.

A feeling of elation filled the room, Blanche would recall. “His soul and his spirit were free. I sensed a room full of angels. His face had become very calm and smooth and lovely. His colour didn’t come back, of course. He was dead.”

The front door to the house opened; there was the sound of footsteps on the granite stairs and Ma, the housekeeper, suddenly appeared. She’d forgotten her telephone.

When Blanche told her Hawke was dead, Ma, who was convinced Hawke had cheated death at least for another day, said, “We must wash the body.”

As Emerson and Winters left the house, she brought a bowl filled with warm water and two wash cloths. Gently, the two women eased Hawke out of his navy blue Qantas tracksuit and rolled him onto his side.

Blanche noted that he smelled quite sweet. There was some blood coming out of his mouth from the pneumonia but “no nasty bodily fluids”.

For 20 minutes, the four hands lovingly washed the cadaver, drying as they went. They started at the head, moving to the trunk, the legs and the feet. Both women treated the body with great care, as if he were alive, gently massaging him, soothing him.

Blanche felt a sense of profound joy that Hawke was finally able to die and escape the prison of his frail body. The two women dressed Hawke and the doctor arrived to issue the death certificate.

As night fell and the press crews packed up after what they thought was another fruitless day, the undertaker’s refrigerated van drove into the garage.

Edited extract from Fridays with Blanche (Allen & Unwin) by Derek Rielly, out now.

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