Death and Life

About ten years ago on a week-long camping trip with close friends in a remote desert corner of Oman, I found myself sitting around the campfire with a Cuban Cigar in one hand and a glass of fruity red wine in the other.  A good friend was summarising his thoughts on the tribulations of expat life away from family – in particular, he’d worked out that based on the ages of his parents, average life expectancy and how often he normally saw them each year, he had just a month left with his parents before they would die.  It was a dry and mathematic approach but you couldn’t disagree with the logic.

Death is a subject that few of us are comfortable talking openly about, which is a little strange considering that all of us must experience it at least once in our lifetimes! Ironically, I find that it’s life insurance advertisements on NZ TV where they talk most openly about it.  But they’re always presented with a liberal slice of humour and still uncomfortable to watch.

My mum died earlier this year.

It forced me to confront my thoughts on the subject.  As you’d expect, it was pretty raw in the beginning and I wasn’t sure if I could write about something so personal on this blog.  But then I thought, well, that’s the very purpose of this blog.  It’s to encourage thought and discussion, including about the topics that we may not find comfortable.

There is no doubt that my first real experience of death was harsh, with my dad dying when I was just eleven.  His death was too early, “unfair”.  Sometimes I wonder if maybe it was a little easier that I was just a little too young to really understand it.  I even thought that because he was the bestest, strongest daddy in the world, he would defy the doctor’s diagnosis and get better.  Right up to the afternoon he died. 

My mum told me just a few months ago that the day dad died, she’d made an offhand, despondent comment to the kindly female doctor running the hospice that “this is the worst day in my life”. The doctor touched her arm and replied simply, “No it’s not”.  And sure enough, as you’d expect, the following years were pretty miserable for my family as we struggled to process it, and carry on with our lives.

As I grew older, my optimism developed and shone through and I managed to find the positive in the situation – my mum, sister and myself formed a pretty tight unit.  And the whole experience was, for sure, the most important factor shaping me into the adult that I’ve grown into.  Mum effectively took over as both mum and dad.  And she did a great job.  I don’t want to say “she made sacrifices”, I mean, parents don’t make “sacrifices” for their own kids.  But she certainly put my sister and I ahead.  The first time I really appreciated this was when I finished university, when I was around 22.  And the second was more recently, after she died.

About four years after my dad, my grandfather died.  I was really surprised that I didn’t feel the deep grief that I felt when I was eleven.  I’d grown really close to my grandad – we exchanged letters frequently and I stayed with him often in school holidays.  He helped me through not just the loss of my dad but a change to a new school where bullying was endemic.  I reasoned that at 82 years, he’d “had a good innings”.  And fresh back from spending a school holiday with him, I remembered him in good health and spirits.  He’d died peacefully in his sleep.  There was nothing “unfair” or “too early” about it, and I found a kind of peace in that.

Compared to my dad, my grandfather’s death wasn’t “unfair” or badly timed.  And I didn’t have any regrets – nothing unsaid, nothing undone.

I think also that death is less regrettable when people have had a fulfilling life.  This of course means different things to different people – love of family and friends, professional respect, travel, experiences, being kind to others – I think there’s no set answer, but I think we all have the opportunity at any time to look back at the way we chose to live our lives and decide ourselves how fulfilled we feel.   And we’ve all heard that saying that “no one on their death bed ever wished they’d worked longer hours”.  But something must be said for living simpler, less complicated lives.  “Becoming un-busy” is a new catchphrase I like, although “becoming busy with the things that matter to you” is probably a more accurate (albiet clumsy!) way of expressing it!

Mum moved overseas and lived an expat life, from my first year of architectural school – living in Australia briefly and then Singapore for about ten years until she retired.  I’m proud of my twenty-something year old self, that when I was a fresh graduate also living in Singapore, I made the effort to see her each week.  It might just be a meal, a movie or a gallery visit, but looking back, it was some of the simplest and best quality time we spent together.

The campfire conversation I mentioned at the start led to an awakening that encouraged me to make more of a concerted effort to spend quality time with mum, and others.  Considering the international lives we each lived, that normally involved meeting somewhere interesting.

Her retirement didn’t bring settling down – from then on she split her time, generally following warm weather between friends and family around NZ, Australia and London.  The expat life appealed to me too and I lived overseas from the last year of my architectural degree in 1996 until Helen and I sailed away from Dubai expat life at the end of 2019.

Mum was a pretty adventurous traveller – even into her seventies she preferred independent travel over tours.  When I organised a trip to Uganda as part of my 40^th year celebrations, mum was disappointed that we didn’t travel on local transport rather than the 4×4 vehicle and local guide it’d organised!  I consider myself quite intrepid, but there’s quite a comfort (and convenience) difference! 

Mum loved being involved, which made travelling with her fun and quite easy to organise.  She’d tag along on some of my marathon running trips, sporting a custom supporting T shirt that Helen would design and print.  She joined me on a few business trips too, relaxing while I worked, then often tagging various extensions on, such as a safari (Kenya), historical attractions (Petra) or city breaks (Paris, Beirut).

In my grandad’s later years, he told us that he didn’t want gifts unless he could eat or drink them!  Unfortunately, my teenage imagination didn’t get too far beyond chocolate.  Similarly, my mum didn’t want any more possessions – but instead gifts of experiences.  Concerts, zip lining, sky diving, scuba diving… all perfectly sensible gifts!  I became accustomed to brushing off my friends saying how amazing mum was.  To me she was just mum.  Why wouldn’t people want to live and travel independently into their grey years?  I did think her learning to scuba dive when she was in her mid-seventies was pretty special though and it was pretty cool when she joined us on some of our frequent dive weekends to the warm waters of Oman.

Mum wasn’t shy to remind me that she’d travelled extensively over a long time.  On visiting Rome together a few years ago, I explained – somewhat proud of my organising skills – that I’d booked our visit to the Colosseum a month prior to beat the queues.  Mum nonchalantly explained that “the last time I visited, dad and I just parked our land rover out front and went right in!”  Granted, that was back in 1970!

My favourite though was when she visited me when I lived in Prague, my Czech friends would inevitably ask if she’d visited the Czech Republic before.  The look of disbelief was comical – she was asked several times “are you sure?” when she replied that she’d driven across Czechoslovakia (as it was then) in August 1968 – a key date as this was the month that the Soviet led Warsaw Pact countries invaded and quashed the Prague Spring revolution.  Mum and dad were so close behind the invasion forces, she remembered clearly the helpfulness of the Czech locals, giving directions, since the Czechs had removed the road signs to confuse the invading forces!

Our pre-Covid plans had us in SE Asia by now, and of course I was expecting mum to visit us there.  I’m actually strangely grateful for Covid, after all, we didn’t plan to spend this much time back here in NZ, and indeed spending so much time with mum.

As Helen and I were locked down in our little yacht Aroha in India, mum likewise was in a little apartment in Auckland. It was my sister who suggested that I call mum each day.  At first it seemed like an excessive frequency – prior to Covid, I’d be lucky if I’d speak to her once a month or so.  But our daily calls soon became a regular feature of my daily routine.  Especially during the initial lock downs, we got pretty good at saving discussion topics up during the day for our afternoon / evening chats.  We continued this habit once we returned to NZ last August – after we had left Auckland to start travelling more widely around NZ.  She loved keeping up with our adventures and she even flew down to join us in a few locations in the South Island – where we’d take an air BnB apartment for a week or so at a time.

Mum wasn’t perfect.  If baiting waiters was an Olympic sport, she’d be on the pedestal for sure.  And she was extremely “principled” with money.  When I was in my first post-graduation job, I found myself hospitalised for ten days with hepatitis A.  Mum refused to help me out with the hospital bill, which the cheap health insurance I’d chosen paid only a small part of.  It took me about five months of heavy duty saving to pay off that high interest credit card bill.  The principle she was teaching me was about accepting the consequences for the choices I made, and I still don’t like borrowing to this day!

Of course it hurts, but I can’t be sad at mum dying.  Death’s a part of life.  She’d had a long, interesting and fulfilling life, and there was no “unfairness” about it.  We’ve had lots of adventures together and saw each other and spoke often – no regrets.

I do miss her though – I’d got used to saving up thoughts and experiences through each day, to share with mum each evening when we spoke.  When I was so excited to see two kiwi in the wild on Rakiura Stewart Island, the first thing I thought was “OMG, Mum’ll be so excited to hear about this!!”  But I wasn’t able to share that adventure with her.

I’ve been working on the draft of this blog far longer than any of the others.  It’s taken a long time to pull my thoughts together to get close to expressing what it is I’m trying to say.  Most of all I’ve been dreading writing the conclusion to this blog.  “Life is short, make the most of it”?  “Give presence not presents”? “Tell those you love that you love them”?  “Be kind”?  It’s all so cliched, isn’t it?  But true.

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