Thank you for being here.

It is a gift!

We know that there are bad times and times of joy. We know sometimes everything is overwhelmingly difficult, and at other times we experience pleasure, sharp and real. We know at the very least (or the very most) we are alive.

Part of being alive is understanding loss, and understanding death. The inevitability about our life is that at some stage it will physically end. This is universal. This is regardless of race or religion. This is despite personality, despite spirituality, despite age, social status or gender. Death is the one thing that unites us all. Look around you. At some point every single one of us will cease to exist, physically. It’s amazing, just thinking about it. We’re all in the same boat even though we have individual ideas about the journey and of course, the destination. It’s amazing (I think).

Our instinct is to be afraid of our own mortality, to fear the death of ones we love and our selves. We have been taught this since we were born. Death is a scary thing. Death wears a black cloak and carries foreign looking weapons. Death is dark. It smells like sadness. It tastes like emptiness. Death is unknown. And if something is unknown it must be frightening. What if you were to discover that death is the one of the most important things about life? That in accepting death we enable ourselves to really live, to really love, to appreciate death as part of a gift. It helps us to understand the value of the people in our lives and to gage the significance of life. If we stand together and support one another in coming to terms with mortality, then we allow our passing to be an experience of tenderness, as opposed to fear.

I just want us all to talk about it so it stops being something so hard to hold.

a story

I wrote to share a story with you. It is not a prize winning story, nor is it a fabulously lovely story, but it is a story all the same…

The Butterfly  

I am sitting somewhere on the outskirts of nowhere I’ve ever been before. It’s an ordinary room, but because of the body it’s been given an elevated status even though there are flies in here too. The others occasionally pop their heads in and comment about things like ‘peace’ and they say with a wistful smile that they can ‘really feel him in here’.

We all had a sense of this nothingness approaching and now the others try to contain it in this room even though it’s everywhere.

A long time ago I told him that I was going to leave school and go and live in the bush in Golden Bay. I fiddled with my hair as I spoke, searching for split ends. I tried to see his face but the computer shielded it. The occasional twitching of his polio Knee was the only indication that he was present. ‘

O.K. was all he said. And he cleared his throat.

He read numbers like words.

A few years later he told me that he’d had a dream where he was flying across mountains that were plastic green. He said he couldn’t believe the speed, the freedom from his body, and how, at the same time everything was so perfectly clear. This confounded him.

He told me about being a boy in England, in the Second World War. He and his mother had lived in a room up a lot of stairs. His mum was never smiling in the stories and always wore black skirts and had ‘an evil eye’. They were walking up the stairs when he heard the high buzz of a plane that turned into an all-encompassing roar. Suddenly, there was an almighty crash and the ground shook beneath him.

‘My mother grabbed me, and pulled me up the stairs. She was about to open the door when I realised something was very wrong.’ He’d pause, wide-eyed and licking his lips. ‘She wrenched open the door and was about to drag us in but I grabbed onto her skirts and pulled her back into the hallway. As the door swung open we saw there was nothing but the sky to greet us. The bomb had sliced the building clean in half. If my mother had taken one more step she would have stepped into nothing and fallen to her death’ . He was always puffed out after this story.

When he got sick sometimes he’d try to climb out of his window in his sleep. He said there wasn’t enough air for him.

He tried to build a flying bicycle when he was seventeen.

When I was seventeen I wanted to be skinny and I wanted to be a famous actress. I took it as a compliment when my tutor told me I would either be very rich, or end up living in a cardboard box. It never occurred to me that he was serious about the cardboard box bit. I lived in a flat at the top of a lot of stairs, in Dunedin, with four of my friends. I listened to Leonard Cohen and so did the boy in the flat downstairs. When he put it on, so would I. I timed the songs perfectly and I felt that we understood each other. We shared the washing line with the boys downstairs for a while, but they started stealing my friend’s underwear. I stopped listening to Leonard Cohen and couldn’t explain why I felt so jealous of Katie.

 I was supposed to be home a few months ago but instead I picked cherries for twelve dollars an hour with Katie. We camped out and had ‘open, angsty & heartfelt communication’ about things I couldn’t really see, but wanted to. My hands were stained with red cherry juice and we were both reluctant to have outside showers.

A man came and visited us in his Ute sometimes. He took us to a beach that was at the end of a long ride through scrub and bush. It was electric with silence and the density of the ocean. I stumbled into the sea, the salt mixing on my lips with sweet cherry flesh, but there was a sudden dip and I found myself swimming with depth upon depth below me. Afterwards we went to his friends house.

‘Theres a lot of sharks there, mate.’ One of them said, giving the man an odd look.

I wrote poems about thunderous bones and being stuffed full of love. The first thing I did after I received the phone call was put on my high heels. When I walked across the orchard to wait for Mum the heels sank into the damp soil. I looked around for Katie but suddenly I felt tired of looking for people.

‘Come home’ - He had said.

I take a deep breath as footsteps drag themselves past the room. I can hear the delight in their voices that such suffering does not have to be theirs, this time. I don’t know them and can hardly differentiate between them, as they all wear the same expressions. They are family friends who have materialised much like the flies have. Through cracks.

It’s stuffy, so I open the window, and outside noises seep in. Cars drive past with the faint song of the sea behind them. There is a rugby game down at the park and occasionally a whistle pierces out, carrying on its wings the faint sound of a crowd humming. I hear that somewhere other than here, things go on as normal. There is a butterfly fluffing round his body, fiercely searching for somewhere safe to land.

 I am sitting on the outskirts of nowhere I’ve ever been before.

The night knocks on the door and tiptoes in so I hold on very tightly to the island that used to be my Dad.

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