My sister Raene and her boyfriend Mark (whom everyone called Crowy) had been working on an orchard/market garden in Earnscleugh, near Alexandra, for the previous few months. After five years of travelling and working together, they’d finally found a place they wanted to stay. They had work they enjoyed, a house they wanted to buy, and if everything went according to plan, they’d soon get married and start a family. But things didn’t go according to plan.
One day, Crowy collapsed and was rushed to Dunedin hospital where it was discovered his heart, already impaired by childhood disease, had been seriously damaged by an infection he’d picked up from a secateurs cut. The only course of action was an eventual heart transplant - the sooner the better. Once he was fit enough to travel, it was recommended they head to Australia (or even home to England), where the chances of finding a suitable donor were much greater.
He never did get fit. Instead, he died a week later, aged 31.
Raene was devastated by his death. Life seemed suddenly meaningless and just downright mean. Her grief wrenched every fibre of my being until it was almost a physical pain.
Crowy’s death I could handle. It was a tragedy. It was totally unfair. Although there would always be an empty space where he had been, and a thread of memories woven through the fabric of my life, it was only a space, only a small part of my life which had been lost. We had been friends when we were together, but we’d been seldom together. Life would go on virtually unchanged, except now our paths would never again cross ... and it was the loss of those myriad future possibilities which weighed most heavily.
Raene’s suffering was unbearable. We have always been close. We spent much of our childhood playing together - driving matchbox cars through cities in the sand; constructing complex forts for our plastic menagerie and cereal box cowboys, before reducing them to rubble with showers of Lego bombs; endless games of Truth or Dare, though nobody dared Truth; and long afternoons discussing what we could do, when sitting in the shade was no longer enough.
She was my baby sister, and I was always there to comfort her, to protect her, to tell her about ants and bees, and to console her when she was tormented by the birds and bees. I was her big brother, and she was always there to listen to me, to believe me (enough to ignore her teacher’s gentle persuasion and insist queen ants fought queen bees, simply because she believed that was what I had told her), to relieve some of my anger at always being last in line with two brothers before me, and an only sister behind.
Later we’d huddled together in the dark listening to the muffled pounding of words against our parents’ bedroom wall, as their anger gradually congealed into hatred. We’d taken turns to grasp first our mother, then our father, as they’d threatened to storm off into the night. Together, alone, we struggled to keep our family from shattering apart. When it was all over, we only had each other to cling to.
So it was only natural that we’d left Australia together. We hitched around Europe for a year, travelling, meeting people, working, growing together, growing apart ... just growing, until love intervened to finally separate us. I stayed with Marion. Raene went alone to Turkey, Israel and, eventually, Crowy. We’d always stayed in touch, and our paths had frequently crossed. They were at the airport in Melbourne when we finally arrived in Australia. We were here in New Zealand when they came looking for a different life.
But there was nothing I could do this time. I couldn’t share her pain, and I couldn’t relieve it. The nights were the worst, when the darkness became an almost physical burden on her shoulders, spilling over us all, weighing us down. I could only be there to gently squeeze the sobs into submission, to hold her so she wasn’t alone in the darkness.
My father was still in the country when he heard the news, so he rushed back to spend a few days with us - Raene, my brother Cameron (who had come to Ettrick for the apple picking season), Marion and I. It was our most complete family reunion since Brisbane, but there was little enthusiasm for reminiscing.
It was good to have someone else to shoulder the burden of mourning. Raene was seeking reassurance, justification, and my father consoled her with words I just didn’t have. He spoke of a benevolent God and Paradise, of a greater purpose and everlasting life, of reunification and guardian angels, of all the ancient tales she wanted to believe, a thousand stumbling words she suddenly needed to believe. He spoke of his own doubt, his inability to truly believe, but at least he allowed comforting hope and the possibility of a higher truth.
I couldn’t lie. I spoke of the eternal cycles of life, the recycling of life, of universal compost and the ghostly souls of memory, of the absence of meaning and inevitable nothingness, and the blankness of despair filled her eyes anew.
It was good to have someone else to shoulder the burden of memory. Raene was seeking deification of Crowy’s glittering soul, and Cameron consoled her with glowing perceptions I just never possessed. He spoke of a perfect life beyond reproach, of a shining example of humanity, and he polished his memories until they shone with a brilliant unreality, bathing them both in sudden shared warmth.
I couldn’t exaggerate. He was human, after all. He could be kind and funny and generous and positive and loving, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes all of them, but sometimes none of them at all. I agreed he was a good person, all in all. And I agreed I would miss him, at times. It was meagre consolation, I knew, but she would have to dredge in someone else’s memory stream to find more than rare glints of gold.
OK, so I’m not the best person to have at a funeral. But death happens too quickly for me to so easily distance it from life. A fine veil may have been drawn between them, but the image remains clear, and though it fades with time - gradually becoming a foggy connect-the-memory-dots outline or condensing into a Reader’s Digest life - the essence remains unchanged. Yesterday’s perceptions aren’t simply crushed beneath today’s heavy reality.
Sometimes, especially at funerals, it would be a relief to be able to wrap myself in religious warmth, but I’ve never found a spiritual blanket which wasn’t moth-eaten and riddled with holes. Religion often seems like a church - impressive and inviting from the outside, but the deeper you delve into it, the darker and more unwelcoming it becomes. A grand edifice containing mostly nothing - hollow and cold, and there’s so much space to be filled by blind faith. Yet I have nothing against religions. Any religion, when reduced to its essence, usually makes sense - unless its essence happens to be “give all thy worldly goods to me” - and I sometimes envy the security of faith.
My problem is always in the details. If the bible had only been five pages long - or just Ten Commandments - maybe I could believe it was the word of a God. All that fineprint makes me nervous. Thou shalt not kill is simple, straightforward, and nobody could object to the general sentiment. Thou shalt not kill ... unless it’s for a good cause, however, is mind-boggling in its hypocrisy. And Thou shalt not kill ... anything, at all, ever, under any circumstance, is patently ludicrous when simply clapping our hands results in untold unseen deaths.
Brevity is never a messiah’s strong point. Neither, it seems, is trust. Perhaps humanity just can’t be trusted to act humanely or interpret fundamental principles in a humane way. Maybe we’re all just too addicted to finding loopholes in every contract to be allowed too much leeway. Or could it be that we’re allowed too little leeway, and each detail, every line of fineprint, is just another bar on our cage, keeping us from wandering off into the wilderness and discovering our own enlightenment?
The only family member missing was my brother David. He’s the relative black sheep of the family, being the only sibling to have held a steady job ever since leaving high school. Apart from the traditional one year OE (spent mostly on Contiki Tours and in the London pub scene) and annual holiday jaunts to tropical island resorts, he’s a rather sedentary character. So sedentary, in fact, he once spent an entire month camped on our sofa in Offenbach, rising only to satisfy bodily demands for food, sleep and relief. But that's a story for another time.
Of course, my mother was also missing, but my parents haven’t been in the same room since their divorce, so it felt entirely natural not to have her there. In fact, she’s been largely absent from our lives since she made the decision to leave so many years ago. She was only sixteen when they married, and within six years they’d had four children, so there was little time for them to grow as individuals or as a couple.
The family consumed her life and her youth. She was always there with warm pikelets piled high with jam and cream after school; fresh, butter-dripping scones on wet Sunday afternoons; drooling hamburger towers on soccer-filled Saturdays; and her famous chocolate rough cake for end-of-year school break-ups.
Her chocolate rough cake was always a hit, and I’d carry the empty Tupperware container home filled with filial pride ... except in Grade 6 when she opted not to make it, and all the way home my bag was heavy with stodgy despair and the remains of her experimental sponge offering. )Years later Marion tried to reproduce it from my childhood reminiscences, but it was an abysmal failure. The chocolate was right, and the coconut was right, but it just wasn’t chocolate rough cake. Of course it may have had something to do with the fact I’d forgotten to mention it wasn’t actually a cake, but was more a slice ...)
She was always there with band-aids, tweezers, hot bread poultices and magical words to soothe a thousand childhood cuts and grazes and burns and splinters. She was cool hands on a fevered forehead; vegemite toast and black tea brought to a sick child’s bed; a spit-moistened hanky wiping away the traces of her lipstick kiss.
But the empty spaces in her day began to gradually widen. At first she filled them with Artex party-plans, later with part-time jobs in ice cream parlours and hot bread kitchens, finally selling Avon door-to-door. Until one day she discovered a door she thought would lead her to freedom. She walked through it and didn’t look back, travelling the length and breadth of Queensland looking for a new home, a better home, a meaning for her life. Instead of freedom, she only found other kinds of imprisonment with jailers less gentle than my father. By the time she discovered there were worse places to be than home, worse things to be than wife and mother, there was no longer any room for her in my father’s life. He had closed his heart and demolished his feelings, incinerating the past in a bonfire of photos and smiling happy times.
So now, even with David and my mother missing, it felt like our complete family was there supporting Raene in her grief. It was impossible to grieve all day. So my father and I continued cutting framing timber, simply to keep busy. My family was brought up to be helpful, though that’s a deceptive word because it doesn’t always mean full of help. A better word would be the German equivalent hilfsbereit - help ready. My family is always ready to help, but when it actually comes to helping, they’re not exactly overflowing with helpfulness. If my brother offers to help carry timber, he won’t just scoop up a heap, stretching his capacity and taking his help to the limit. No, it’s more like - “How much timber should I carry at one time?” “As much as you can.” “How much are you carrying?” “Six or seven boards.” And so the extent, the parameters, of his help are established, after which he’ll carry six or seven boards at a time until all the boards are carried, or he gets a splinter - whichever comes first. A helpful person would test out that 6-7 boards and maybe push it a little to see whether it can be stretched any further. Maybe it’s possible to take it to 8or 9. The fact I quickly realise how meagre my initial estimate was and start moving up to the 10-12 category, doesn’t matter. The helpfulness contract has been signed and cannot be altered by a dozen solicitors.
Slowly everything returned to relative normality. My father returned to Australia, Raene accompanied Crowy’s body back to Liverpool, and Cameron returned to apple-picking. Marion also decided to go back picking another season, her third. It was a decision that was set to rock the very foundations of my life.
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