We are not likely to forget the day we buried Aunt Tui.
In an unhappy coincidence, we mourners stuffed into the small Catholic church in Murchison last Wednesday were asked to pray for the Pike River Coal mine families at about the time another blast removed any flicker of hope.
We knew nothing of that development as we sat there that warm afternoon, some of us marvelling at our automatic responses despite years of Mass avoidance.
Aunt's contribution, always slightly slower and three times as clear as anyone else's, was missing from the back pew.
We would not hear her sing, deliver a precise reading, or see her take a dignified walk to receive communion.
She would not be outside afterwards, the ever-present roll-your-own bobbing up and down on her lip, as she laughed or dispensed opinions with a tongue as sharp as her intellect.
After more than 92 years, this extraordinary woman, the last of my father's six siblings, was dead.
She was not an easy woman to sum up. Those who are larger than life tend to spawn stories which are the same.
I had convinced myself, for instance, that in recent years, as she became acutely self-conscious about her ramshackle house, that she used to greet visitors at the nearby cattlestop with a gun.
I was assured that was not the case although she was known for her exploits with a .22, including shooting rabbits from the comfort of her car; on one occasion a wayward bullet entering the car door.
There were other incidents involving cars recalled, among them her towing her harrow around paddocks with one of her Volkswagens.
My maiden aunt had inherited a family farm and for some years combined farming with teaching art and music at the local school.
She was an exacting teacher, never one to tolerate fools, and could be colourfully unsparing about her former pupils: "He was as thick as a double ditch" was not an uncommon phrase.
My older townie cousins remembered the fun of being dispatched to her for holidays for some countrification - times which included involvement in some hair-raising farming tasks, frequent correction of their grammar and being taken to musical events and Labour Party meetings.
One recalled excitement at finding a pistol and disappointment at not being able to find any ammunition for it.
She read widely and was a great raconteur, in both formal and informal settings, and it was not hard to find people at the funeral with a witty or cutting Tuism to recall.
And while as nieces and nephews we admired the way she stood out from the crowd, in many ways living and behaving more like a man than a traditional woman, we were also wary of her.
Quietly, I wondered if maintaining a prickly veneer much of the time was the price she felt she had to pay for being unconventional.
I also remembered she had introduced my parents, then a few years later accompanied my father as he drove terrifyingly fast to Nelson to see his young wife who had died of an asthma attack, and less than 20 years later, came to sit quietly beside me as I sobbed after Dad's sudden death.
There was no hugging. Displays of affection were not her style. She just listened to my blithering. It never occurred to me then that she too must have been devastated by Dad's death - the first of her siblings to die and probably the one she was closest to.
Some of the oomph went out of her after her long-time woman companion died unexpectedly in the 1980s and as her remaining siblings all died.
She probably hoped she would die at home after she collapsed on her coal heap with a brain bleed several years ago. (The man who had delivered that Spring Creek coal remembered her telling him she didn't know whether she should spring or creak.)
She received treatment, however, followed by several years in a rest-home enjoying warmth and comfort and the luxury of having food cooked for her, something she mostly appeared to adapt to surprisingly well.
Following the excitement of the funeral, we were brought down to earth with the day's tragic news about the Pike River mine.
I knew those funerals would be so different from our Murchison gathering where the life had run more than its natural course and we could celebrate or mourn it without all the world and his wife looking on and wanting a piece of it.
It was too much. We left the television and went to admire my niece's new pony.
Afterwards, one of my sons tested Aunt Tui's old G. Schwechten piano in my sister's shed. He declared the keys a bit sticky, but it sounded good to us.
Suddenly, I felt an overwhelming and inexplicable sense of loss.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
