I’ve been blessed with Uncles many and splendid but none so mischievous as my Uncle Colin. Tanned face always smiling, he loved to pull your leg.
Uncle Colin gathered our kid gang and told us about the special stones to be found at Punakaiki. Soup stones. If we chose the right ones they could be used to make a fantastic soup for our parents. Those stones boiled for hours, days. My sister Veronica was the last to abandon hope, so convinced was she by Colin’s brand of magic.
He died last week, Uncle Colin. A heart attack mowing the lawns - not a bad way to go at 85, all things considered.
The whitebait were running on the coast. Mum and I headed to the funeral.
"It’ll be like Thelma and Louise," she said.
"That doesn’t have the happiest of endings," I said.
I drove her Jag, indicators and wipers on the other side of the steering wheel, V8 motor grumbling and eating money. It was like travelling in a very fast leather armchair. Mum corrected my driving the entire way.
My stepfather had prepared a list of landmarks (giant barn) and towns (Geraldine, Springfield) we had to go through to get there because Mum and I have both been known to zig when we ought to zag and find ourselves significantly off the beaten trail.
The road to the coast through Arthur's Pass is peppered with many fatal spots. I know this because mum pointed out each one. Where someone had hit a one-lane bridge, where another someone had plunged into a ravine. I’m surprised anyone made it to their destination, the bad luck they had back in the day. Despite this catalogue of catastrophes, I loved the way the landscape changed once we turned at Winchester, left the plains and headed into the mountains, past the moonscape of boulders at Castle Hill, where a group of hikers had probably been forced to eat each other.
On the drive I learned things about my Depression-era grandparents I’d never known. They had lived in a tent in the first year of their marriage. I pictured my teenage grandmother, who would give birth to 13 children. How brave she must have been, the force of personality it must have taken to make a go of life. I had only known her as a slightly grumpy matriarch, and after all those children who could blame her for having a lack of patience for the absolute sea of grandchildren that followed.
Greymouth is surrounded by dense bush, the wild creeps right up to the houses, towering nikau like giant feather dusters. The sea was glittering. Everywhere we went, people were astonishingly friendly. The whitebait sandwiches were on thick white bread. The whole place was doing an advertisement for moving to the coast that Development West Coast would have been proud of.
The town was filled to the gunnels, no room at the inn, luckily there was a last-minute cancellation but we’d have to share a bed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shared a bed with my mum, it felt like never. Co-sleeping wasn’t really a thing when I was a child. Everything, Everywhere All at Once was playing on Sky. It’s very hard to explain this movie if you come in half way through — I tried to tell mum it was about the mother/daughter relationship but Jamie Lee Curtis’ sausage fingers made this confusingly unbelievable.
We caught up with family the next day. There is something marvellous about pulling up to a house you haven’t been to for a decade and the people who live there are so pleased to see you, just because you are related to them, that they stop everything. They hug you in a different way. Hard and tight, hugs you can feel. Sitting down for a natter is the most important thing in their lives right now, all other concerns must be swept from the table, the kettle boiled, baking brought out. Whatever your heart desires. It is just that good to see you. What have you been doing for the past 10 years? They really want to know. I had this weird feeling that I was learning to talk again, relearning the art of conversation, utterly missing from my day to day life. I felt buoyed up, seen.
After an absence I plunged into the bloodstream again, who was doing what and where. There are so many of us, keeping track of it all can make your head spin. However, my mother’s sibling numbers are decreasing and there is much bad news, cancer and heart problems. Never quiet people, it hurts so much more when the light of such robust, character-filled people is diminished. My mother’s brothers and sisters have always made a point of coming together where possible - as a child I would marvel at the resemblance shared by the sisters: the same strong nose, the same fabulous laugh, the sheer noise of them all gathered - now there are gaps. Would my generation keep such close ties?
The funeral notice in the Greymouth Star was a long list of much loveds including those gone ahead, my father included. He and Colin had been great mates. Family is a weave of people who know you, the freckled bespectacled girl; you, the young and lost solo mother; you, the grown woman. Connecting with family, you are a part of something larger than yourself, larger than death even, as they make up your essence and through you they continue.
The funeral was a mini family reunion, Burrells cluttering up the aisle, hugging and teasing each other about who had got the most whitebait, making joyful noises in a sad time.
Colin and his wife Eileen (my mother’s sister and the spit of her), beautiful in their youth - he a smooth young man, she perfectly coiffed, beamed down, projected on to the back wall. He had loved the crooners. People shared memories of Colin. His neighbour of 30-plus years gave testimony to a great guy. His brother lamented the fact that he would never collect on a bet he had with Colin about who would die first. "And it was 100 bucks." The recessional music was The Bird Dance. The joy and silliness with which Colin approached life was celebrated.
Too hard for mum to stay much longer without wanting to stay forever, we made an Irish exit. Although that would be noisy and tearful and after several drinks, so a French exit, perhaps. We started the long drive homeward. Reversing the order of my stepfather’s list, mountains to the plains and the sea. Crossing from one side to the other of this small island we call home.
