Death and taxes, both unavoidable, if those angry letters from the Inland Revenue are anything to go by. Death’s sting is lessened by living a life that touched many and rang true.
How you go out is just as important as how you get here. The Mighty Mustering Man will no doubt slide into the box sideways covered in dirt, utterly wrecked. I will probably die by accident, talking, holding a glass of wine, walking backwards off something.
Afterwards only matters to those left behind. Keith Richards, legend has it, snorted his father’s ashes (by mistake?). Hunter S. Thompson was shot out of a cannon. I’d like to be stuffed and mounted in the corner of the living room as a warning to the women who come after me, a taxidermy version of Browning’s My Last Duchess.
Funerals, as I said, are events not looked forward to by the eulogised; rather an occasion for the living, a farewell to the departed, a reminder to go forward with courage.
I think you would have liked your funeral, Roy Colbert. It was quite possibly the best funeral ever.
It had it all: inappropriate behaviour, famous people, great stories, sports facts and sledging.
Graeme Sydney was especially rotten about your lack of height, but then you did call him a ‘‘second rate’’ (at best) painter. Shane Carter spoke of your near-constant defamation.
Marshal Seifert exhorted us to stand and sing ‘‘for he was a jolly good fellow, hip hip hoo-Roy’’.
Never have I been to a funeral filled with so much laughter. Like everyone there, I felt honoured to be able to say I knew you. As the godfather of the Dunedin sound, it was only natural that some of its members sang for you.
An occasion sad and yet not solemn, sweetened by the way those seated and standing slowly broke with convention and started to clap, nervously at first and then with vigour, after each tribute, patrons attending a one-off gig they always expected to be phenomenal.
Your coffin, covered in lollies or ‘‘important diabetic medication’’ was small. You were small too, but lived big.
Funerals are best when they contain surprises.
I didn’t know you wrote under different pseudonyms, which seemed fitting, as you were many things to many people.
I know you would have enjoyed the man who constantly and loudly smacked his hands together and ‘‘A-ha’d’’ throughout, throwing his right arm in the air as if testifying or holding an imaginary lighter. And the chap who fell asleep and snored loudly and the lady with wild white hair who ate sweets with noisy cellophane wrappers during the quiet bits.
I knew you loved sport, but had no idea of the extent of your passion for basketball. Despite the sword of ill health hanging over you from teenage years, you lived far longer than anyone so sick could have expected and never grumbled. You laughed through the pain because it made a better story, making a comedy of your series of unfortunate events and status as a challenge to medical students: ‘‘What’s not wrong with this patient today?’’
You introduced me to my friend Emmanuelle Gomez, telling the both of us that we were as crazy as each other and would therefore get on like a house on fire. We did and still do and stood at the back of the chapel glad of it.
You and Christine had come to her weddings and not mixed up her husbands to their faces and, as for me, when I worked at the Fortune Theatre I used to trip trap down Stuart St in my ridiculous heels to Records Records to sit in the red chair and smoke cigarettes and hide from the artistic director who could be a bit shouty about budgets.
Your emails, full of sardonic wit and the juiciest gossip, made me want to put pen to paper myself and I cringe at the early efforts I sent you, always a generous mentor, even though you had better things to do than read my turgid, over-egged prose.
You told me to stay away from cheap laughs (I didn’t listen) and made writing look easy when it only looks that way if you are very, very good at it.
I didn’t cry at your funeral. It was too happy an occasion, but later, listening to Submarine Bells by the Chills, part of a RNZ programme about you, I did.
Go well my friend, and thank you.
