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Last Thursday afternoon, ostensibly on holiday in the Wairarapa, I sat with my husband on a couch that didn’t belong to us, in a house that wasn’t ours, and watched his mum say goodbye to her brother on the same TV we’d been glued to the night before watching US election coverage.
The same TV that allowed us to join hundreds of millions of others in a collective holding of breath, wondering whether the moral arc of the universe would bend the right way, now dropped us into our own, isolated island of grief to live-stream loss in the time of Covid.
My husband’s Uncle Mike died in Sydney, where he’d lived with family for the last 23 years, on Sunday November 1.
My mother-in-law, Karen, was the only New Zealand-based family member who travelled over to be with him in his last days. Mike had Down syndrome and Karen was his legal guardian.
If life doesn’t come with a manual, it sure as shit doesn’t come with a guide to comforting your husband as he watches his mum sit in a chair, spaced 2m apart from everyone else, attending the funeral of a man who helped shape the person he is today.
There is no WikiHow on what to do when a son can’t put his arms around his mother at a time when every fibre in his grieving body is crying out to do just that.
I put my arms around him, honouring the promise I made to Karen on the phone to look after him, but I also know it’s the very definition of a consolation prize.
Most cultures have evolved practices that, through the breaking of bread and the sharing of stories, pull us out of our isolation and individual grief and back into the collective experience of farewelling a loved one.
It provides a kind of temporary, full stop to the profound intensity of loss.
The service itself was lovely.
Mike was brought into the chapel to ‘Jailhouse Rock’. The Australian celebrant did an admirable job of pronouncing the Māori words sprinkled throughout the emailed tributes.
Someone did a haka and the service ended with ‘Hine e Hine’, gently tethering Mike to his whānau watching in the same way we were, back in Aotearoa.
And then it ended. The room emptied out and our last act in the formal proceedings on our side of the ditch was to yank the HDMI cable out of the laptop.
At every funeral I’ve ever been to, necessary catharsis is often found in what my Irish-Catholic, rugby-loving family describe as the ‘after match’.
Most cultures have evolved practices that, through the breaking of bread and the sharing of stories, pull us out of our isolation and individual grief and back into the collective experience of farewelling a loved one.
It provides a kind of temporary, full stop to the profound intensity of loss. Irreverence counters reverence, jokes replace solemnity and food nourishes both body and soul.
These communal experiences ground us, reminding us of the legacy of love left behind by the person we have said goodbye to.
They exist not as frivolous excuses for a hooley but as a necessary part of moving us through to the next stage.
We are doing everything we’re meant to do as players in this collective nightmare and still, we are doing it alone. Continue reading
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