In 1985, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. I took him to the hospital for surgery, and was allowed to sit with him before he was wheeled into theatre. My mother stayed at home, unable to bear the worry of it all. One lung was excised, but cancer remained centrally, where the bronchi join the trachea, impossible to remove. After two weeks, Dad was sent home, and he refused to return to the doctor despite his increasing pain.
When he started coughing up blood again, fearful of contamination my mother covered a cardboard box with rather nasty, beige-flecked wallpaper as a receptacle for stained tissues, which she took down for burning in our old concrete incinerator in the garden. Dad must have known that his days were numbered. He added a codicil to his will, leaving his body to the university’s school of medicine, or to any other similar institution in New Zealand, in the hope of saving my mother the expense of a funeral.
Two weeks before he died, I finally drove him in his much-loved Holden Kingswood to his doctor, who was appalled that Dad had struggled on without pain relief for so long. On one of my daily visits, I found a cheery nun with a fetching wimple who had come from the Mercy Hospice to check on his progress. On the day he couldn’t get out of bed, the ambulance came. The drivers had some difficulty negotiating the stretcher past the scoria that lined the side of the front steps, but they eventually loaded Dad in and I followed the ambulance in his car.
The Mercy Hospice was then situated on Mountain Road, and Dad was placed in a room on the top floor with a view of Maungawhau Mount Eden, the maunga we gazed at every day from Landscape Road. After a visit from a young doctor, who asked Dad the routine questions about his date of birth and current address and examined his fingernails (I still do not know why, but perhaps they are an indicator of decline), I was left to tell Dad that there was no longer any treatment he could have.
When my son came to say goodbye, Dad struggled out of bed, determined that his grandson would think him strong to the last. My mother and younger brother arrived, but Mike was too distressed to stay long and took Mum home again. The next day Dad gradually slipped into a coma, and in the late afternoon, when the nurses suggested I take a break, I drove his car to Ponsonby to have a quick meal with friends. Just as I was about to leave, the call came, and I raced back to the hospice only to find the main door locked.
A chase worthy of an English cop show ensued as I ran frantically around the building trying to find a way in. After that I had difficulty finding the lift. Somehow it seemed a fitting finale to the chaos of our earlier lives. By the time I reached his room Dad had died, although the nurses assured me they had told him I was coming.
Perhaps he wanted to spare me the sight of him gasping for breath. He was propped upright, like a Baroque painting of the death of Saint Jerome, his face still showing signs of recent struggle. I was led into the adjoining chapel while they attended to him. When my mother and brothers arrived, he was lying flat and covered with a white sheet up to his neck, a red rose between his hands. None of us commented on how incongruous that seemed. A lump of scoria would have been more fitting.
My older brother went to Dad’s side and leaned over, pressing firmly on his chest as if laying fear to rest. It was 28 January 1987, and Dad was 72 years old. His death certificate noted his cancer and recorded the immediate cause of death as ‘Anorexia, exhaustion — 30 days’, a statement that upset my mother as she thought it meant she hadn’t fed him properly. True to form, even Dad’s final wishes went awry, because on the day he died there was a surfeit of corpses at the medical school.
Down in the garden Dad had created a large barbecue area — its concreted scoria bench was lethal if you sat carelessly — adjacent to a scoria bird bath too shallow for birds to bathe in, and a rickety table with various coloured pieces of rock held in place by a frame of untreated wood. Two beer cans filled with concrete and painted the same dried-blood brown that Dad had once bought in bulk from a remainder store held up each corner.
On the day after he died, we stood in the garden, the sunshine a balm after the anguish of the previous days. One of my brothers idly nudged the table with his toe, and we collapsed with laughter as it swayed back and forth before breaking apart. Dad had forgotten to put in any reinforcing rods. Perhaps he had been harking back to his prison camp days, when tins were fashioned into a wide variety of useful or decorative items.
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At his funeral we draped his coffin with the national flag, an honour allowed past service people, on top of which I placed a large, unruly spray of leaves from his favourite plants from the garden. I had written the eulogy, which was delivered by a clergyman who kept veering off my text to insert references to God. We found out later that he was in the early stages of dementia. Perhaps he found my mentions of scoria inappropriate, but it seemed more accurate to us than speaking of heaven.
Later, I scattered Dad’s ashes around the summit of Maungakiekie with a friend. I sensed the sacred nature of the maunga, and with Dad’s volcanic nature, his love of ‘the rock’ and his long working life at Ihumātao, it seemed a fitting resting place.
When my mother died eight years later, it was a different story. First, a friend and I couldn’t get the ugly grey plastic container that contained her ashes open, and we had to resort to using a penknife, much to the bewilderment of a busload of tourists. I had somehow imagined her ashes melding with those of my father, now long gone, but she’d obviously had quite enough of that, for she rose up and drifted off towards home, though not before a gust blew part of her back to settle all over me and I had to go to a friend’s house nearby and wash her off.
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Loss is a complicated experience, for it seems that parents never leave us. Twelve years after my mother died, I was working at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki when we moved into the Bledisloe Building for the duration of the gallery’s refurbishment. Once settled in, our kaumātua Arnold Manaaki Wilson came to bless the office spaces. We followed him from cubicle to cubicle, lightly touching each of the walls. When he came to reception, he spoke softly to the newly appointed receptionist, telling her not to worry, as her parent was all right. Her face flushed and tears ran down her cheeks, for unbeknown to us her father had passed away a fortnight before. He delivered a similar message to one of our photographers.
When we returned to the other end of the floor and entered my cluttered little space, Arnold looked at me and said he would return later. Bemused, I waited. Eventually, he came back, and stood and paused a moment, before saying, ‘It’s very crowded — there are two other people in here.’ He then described them: a larger man and a tiny woman with white hair.
It took me some time to regain my composure, but when I did I asked Arnold if the two figures were arguing. He chuckled, before replying that people couldn’t live together for that long without having a few squabbles. I found this hugely comforting, but it also struck me that grief shadows you, lurking in your filing cabinets or in among your books, waiting for the right time to take you by surprise.
