Loss and sorrow

In the space of about a month there has been a string of bereavements around here. My sister’s wonderful Aussie husband, Lionel, died of mesothelioma. It is a lung cancer from asbestos dust, which no doubt he inhaled many years ago when builders worked with that stuff. Lionel was in his mid-80s, and he and my sister had enjoyed 11 years together.

Then word came that our aged Kiwi aunt Jean had died in California aged 103. She was a wonderful lady. I used to visit her when I could. Jean had known much sorrow and loss. Her husband, my uncle Lex, died suddenly far too early. Her son David later committed suicide -- and that, I think, for a parent, is a grief far too far. Jean battled on, inimitably in many ways.

The same weekend came news that a much loved cousin Nora, in Glasgow, had died, also at a great age. Nora and her husband Jimmie were very good to Mary and me when we lived in Scotland for a while, long ago.

Still absorbing all that, we got news that a dearly loved friend in Fiji, Ethel Naidu, had died. Ethel was a widely loved parishioner and Elder at St Andrew’s Church in Suva, and was known all around the Arts Club, education and musical scenes.

Next, my younger brother Morris suddenly took ill with metastatic melanoma. He went downhill quickly and died last Sunday. Of all of us, Morris was the most remote, yet we feel his loss keenly. He had decreed that there was to be no funeral or other commemoration. It certainly seems strange, but his wishes have been respected.

Perhaps then I have been a little bristly, cantankerous you might say, in recent days. It has not been a smart idea to cross me. And this morning I walked into a local shop into the middle of a general “debate”, actually an airing of clichés and prejudices, about the state of the nation and in particular the wreck of the container ship Rena on a reef outside Tauranga. Thick oil and large shipping containers are now washing ashore on their beaches. Strange, how these beaches apparently were “pristine” -- but that’s just part of the general journalistic abuse of the language and of the meaning of words.

One bloke in the shop immediately tried to enlist me to agree with him that the bloody government bears the guilt of all this. That seemed to be the general default position in the shop. So I said that was absurd, and that we are turning into a nation of chronic grizzlers. Silence reigned in the shop for all of 30 seconds, and then this bloke bawled, What are yuh, some bloody greenie...? He had somehow to reassert dominance and resume being the alpha male. I guess whoever else lives in his home has long since learned to submit. I said, Yes, I’m an environmentalist. Are you not...? And I walked away. This bigot can’t cope with anyone not singing from his hymnbook. He shouted after me, Garn, yuh bloody greenie...

I simply couldn’t conceive trying to explain to this loudmouth that in the rhythms of life and death, loss and sorrow, it’s better to be grateful. We are not starving, although plenty of people are having to watch their spending carefully. Our country is not at war, let alone riven by civil war. We get the governments we vote for, which is more than ever happens in many countries, including Fiji. It is indeed sad about the container ship. It is sadder about Christchurch’s sorrows. But grizzling as a reflex reaction is to be avoided, it seems to me. St Benedict saw that long centuries ago. If people were to live together in community then what he called grumbling was to be actively discouraged. And I am a Benedictine.