Sometimes When We Touch
I was visiting with my friend Rob on Friday. He’s the father of my old school friend Sal and her brothers Michael and Davy. You might think it strange my talking about my school friend’s Dad as if he was my friend, but actually, it’s taken years and growing older myself to realise how that came about.
I’d visited Rob a month or so earlier at his home along the tranquil country bylanes of Te Aute Trust Road. That day I recall, had been sunny and so was his mood. He’d made us a superlative pot of tea, just the way I liked it. Strong, so not even a horseshoe would stay afloat in it under duress! We sat at a table looking out to the paddocks where the sun played on the grass. Hide and seek games of mischief with the lengthening shadows of day.
We were in catch up mode so everything and anything was up for discussion that day. I’d told him about my trip up the Whanganui awa (river) in March earlier this year. Without explanation he stood up and returned minutes later with a thick photo album that chronicled his own trip up the awa (river) in preceding years. That’s when it happened. When my friend’s Dad became my friend.
It was like coming out from the shadows into the warmth of day. A common and shared experience that we both understood. As I listened to his adventures I realised I could see Rob. Not my friend’s father. Not her brothers’ Dad, but Rob. In that moment, my life seemed to have that feel again of ancient twists and philanthropian turns. A defining key had turned in some unseen lock inside my life, a hidden vault where precious taonga or treasures are stored.
Rob was pretty matter-of-fact as he looked at his friends in the photos. He missed his friend Basil who’d passed away years before from lung cancer. There’s a place where the depth of another person’s reverie doesn’t permit us to go, or at least that’s what I think, so I waited outside it’s door, respectful. Privileged to witness it.
Quietly, he mentioned that many of his good friends had all passed on now. What do you say in response to an aside like that? A moment of human statement, no more and no less. I said nothing, tho’ I acknowledged it in my heart and head. I’d come with Michael to a private Home for the Aged in Havelock North to see him this time.
As we swung through its gate entrance, I was aware of the low purr of the V8 Monaro saloon beneath us. There was a comfort in it because I felt at the same time a sore rush of emotion grab at my heart. Vocal folds in my memory’s larynx alternately dilating and rapidly constricting the glottis, causing those air vibrations. You know the ones, all the hallmarks of a painful ache for reasons only our bodies know and our heads deny. I made myself breathe.
Rob’s room is at the end of the corridor on the second floor. Light and airy with views across to the Ruahines with tree tops in the foreground. In front of him is a flatscreen television from Michael’s home office with a white label that read “P.S. I love you xoxo. I found it!” A childhood reminder to Michael that his daughter Hilary had found the Dynamo labeller he’d tried to hide from her. There’s an A4 felt-tip drawing on the wall to the left of the TV of a youthfully-interpreted Rob, an unsigned work. Beside the TV, family photographs. On his bedside table, a family pic and some meds and his glasses.
He’s an elegant man, silver hair, with skin that has in these advanced stages of his cancer, a pearl-like lustre. He’s so handsome. I often feel that death gives us a gift we rarely expect, a singularly deeper insight into life, our own and how that means. We spend our entire lives readying ourselves for living, yet I think we’re quite ill-equipped when it comes to the prospect of not living any longer. We’re profoundly dumb in the wake of the tidal sense we experience of feeling all at sea.
So as I sat beside my friend, his blue pj’s the colour of his eyes and the sky, his big but still strong looking hand resting against the table in front of him, I wanted to wipe the tear from his left eye that had formed there when he reminded Michael he knew exactly who I was. I realised I wanted to wipe it away because my own tear was forming at the corner of my heart’s eye.
I think I see your old mate Bas, cold beer in hand, waiting impatiently. It’s not even beer o’clock but no matter. There’s no need for a beer-o’clock-somewhere-in-the-world reason. I suspect you’ll both just be in catch up mode about everything and anything. Perhaps if time exists there, at bang on 5pm Granny will knock up her ‘hearty’ G&T for old time sakes.
What does the gift of death give us? Each other, that’s what. And for those of us that continue on? It gifts us to life, that’s what. I’m reminded that sometimes when we touch each others lives, we may continue to unwrap our own with feelings of gratefulness and thanksgiving. So thank you for the reminder today Rob. Travel well my friend.
UPDATE: Rob passed away peacefully on Monday 25 October 2010. His funeral service was held at the historic Christ’s Church, Pukehou on 28 October 2010. Haere ra my friend x
