So far, for now

How this new condition

changes language, not we

or us or ours

but I and me

and mine, mine alone

the hollow hours.

‘Sleep a little longer,’ my husband said, that morning. ‘You have a long day ahead of you.’

‘It will be the last time I go,’ I said. ‘No more travel. I’m going to be at home with you. Summer’s coming and we’ll spend it together.’

‘I know,’ he said.

We had always been on the move, that is how we were, but always, too, homing in, back to our house on the hill. I had kept going here and there longer than Ian, but then I was younger. I knew how he waited for me to return each time I jumped on a plane to go somewhere – to Europe, to a festival or just away for a day, like this trip to Auckland for a reading, some book sales.

His frailty was increasing. What was more important? I asked myself. The public life of a writer, or spending precious time with the person with whom I had shared my life? When I said that the travel was over, this was the last trip, I knew Ian was happy, although he had never tried to hold me back. This was another thing about us: we gave each other freedom to be who we were, to go where we pleased, to share the company of others. But, of late, I had sensed that my absences had become harder for him. Two weeks earlier I had finished writing my novel, This Mortal Boy. It had been an all-encompassing process, consuming my thoughts day and night.

‘Thank you for coming back to me,’ he said, a few days after I announced that I had arrived at the end of the book.

‘I never left you,’ I said. ‘I was there all the time.’

He had shaken his head. And I suppose in a sense I was away when I wrote. As I suppose I am now, although there is nobody here to notice one way or another.

The reading went well. In the taxi back to the airport I rang and told him all about it. But I was tired that night. At the airport I learned that the plane was running late. I left my phone in the tray when I went through security. I was called on the PA system to collect it. That meant going back and through security again, and then proving that it was my phone. And then the plane was delayed again. At home, we were due to watch The Brokenwood Mysteries, our favourite-of-the-moment Sunday night programme. Just watch it, I told Ian. You don’t have to wait for me. But he said he would record it so we could watch it together when I got home, or the next night, it didn’t matter.

For the next hour or so, until we finally got under way, I read Diana Wichtel’s fine memoir, Driving to Treblinka, about her search for her missing father. I rang Ian again when we got into Wellington, around 11 p.m., and told him I’d be there in a few minutes. I had taken up the offer of a taxi chit because I didn’t want him driving out in the dark. He was due to give up his beloved old Mercedes sports car in the next week or two. He’d accepted that.

He was there waiting for me when the taxi drew up.

There is a long flight of stairs up to our house. The cable car wasn’t working that night. Ian had come down, torch in hand. I berated him for doing so.

‘Hurry on up,’ he said. ‘It’s cold and I’ve got the house nice and warm and all the lights are on. Keep going.’

So hurry I did. I passed him and then, two steps ahead, I heard Ian fall. The thud. That sound will stay with me always.

There are some writers who would tell you the last detail. I’m not one of them. I thought I was, but I’m not.

The ambulance drove slowly through the deserted streets. I recalled Ian saying once that when an ambulance was going slowly it was a bad sign; there was nothing to hurry for, like the night my father was taken to hospital for the last time. The ambulance stopped while Ian’s oxygen was adjusted. I remember that we were taken through a side door to Accident and Emergency but the next hour became a dream time. There was a CAT scan and a neurosurgeon. My family had begun to arrive: my daughter and her husband and my granddaughter.

I think it was the neurosurgeon who suggested that my husband’s life support be turned off. There was irreversible brain damage. It could be a few minutes, perhaps a couple of hours, before Ian died. We needed to make the way easier for him.

Yes, I said. I guess so. Whatever is best. I suppose people say no. The situation was explained to me, the x-rays shown, demonstrating the extent of the injuries. So, yes, I said again. What else could I have done?

We told the rest of the family. My son was in Australia. He rang all his five sons and, in turn, they each called my mobile and asked that it be held to Ian’s ear so they could say their goodbyes. One of the boys was already at the hospital with his mother. One was in Australia, another in London. When they had all spoken to their grandfather, they told me they were on their way home. All of them.

A nurse asked if there was anyone else I wanted to call. The monks, I said. For Ian was a Buddhist. His whakapapa stretched back to Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāti Raukawa, but over the last thirty or so years, he had identified strongly with the Cambodian community, seen himself as a part of it. It had begun when he was a schoolteacher in a catchment area for refugees, and a tide of people who had escaped the Khmer Rouge regime came into his care. Two or three times a year, until age caught up with him, he had travelled to Cambodia as a volunteer worker with landmine victims. A part of his life was devoted to the local community that worshipped at Buddhachayamahanath Temple, overlooking the sea at Island Bay; the senior monk was one of Ian’s closest friends.

So, as the night turned into morning, saffron-robed men appeared and started to chant. The steady rhythm of their voices began to calm us.

Ian, not yet ready to die, breathed steadily on.

A nurse said she thought it would be best to move him to a ward where we could all be more private. They were not happy about taking him through the corridors, because he might die in transit, and they didn’t like this to happen. Still, she could see that the swelling crowd and the chanting would be better ‘upstairs’.

As we made our way through the hospital, I realised I was still wearing the clothes I’d had on at the literary gathering in Auckland. The vigil began, the monks chanting intermittently until dawn broke, when they had to leave for prayers at the temple.

I asked the family to go home and sleep. I wanted to spend some time alone with my husband, just to hold his hand and talk to him about all our life together. I had met him when I was nineteen. We had been a couple for fifty-eight years. I believed he could hear me, although the nurses said that he couldn’t.

The family, risen although I don’t believe anyone had slept, called by to bring me food and a change of clothes. I’d rung people, close friends, Ian’s sister. A little boy brought by his father unfurled a kite Ian had given him and raced it around the room.

I talked to Ian about the children and how they had made us happy and how things had turned out all right in the long run. I was talking to him about the River Kwai, where we once spent days in a green jungle retreat, and about the Hokianga, where we took holidays every other summer, when a nurse came in.

The staff had been good and kind and gentle. This nurse said, ‘It’s all right, it was an accident.’ It was only days later that I turned this comment over more thoroughly. At the time, I thought, Well, yes, of course it was an accident. How could it have been anything else? Why did I need to be reassured?

When later came, I thought, Well, it happens, I suppose. You read about these things in the newspaper. I wondered how it had been determined as an accident, as opposed to not being one.

What I actually said, by way of reply, was that Ian had squeezed my hand when I was talking to him.

She said that that wasn’t possible, it would have been a reflex.

‘So I’ll never hear his voice again?’ I said.

‘It’s very unlikely,’ she said, and I knew I was backing her into a corner. I have a friend who is a scientist. He has reminded me of Einstein’s theory that all matter is vibrations, even objects that appear to be stationary. A bust of Einstein stands in our garden; it’s been there for decades. When I look out the window from where I’m writing, I see his blind concrete eyes, his bristling moustache. He was our touchstone. We would refer to Einstein to resolve our problems. I couldn’t believe, that morning, that Ian did not hear me, was not conscious, in some area of his still breathing form, of the things I had told him.

By the early afternoon a crowd had gathered, all the family who could get there now assembled. Our son was on his way from Australia. At the temple, the monks had told worshippers the news and word had spread. The corridors of the hospital had filled with Cambodians. There were people everywhere. The chanting rose and rose.

So my husband died.

I turned to my family and said, in disbelief, ‘I’m a widow now, aren’t I?’

Some forty hours had passed since I had woken the previous day for the trip to Auckland. Now I slept for fourteen hours straight. Before I went to sleep, I found Ian’s old brown woollen jersey and held it in my arms, his scent still fresh on it.

When I woke, the house had been taken over. The family had moved in. I noticed the change as soon as I entered the kitchen. Ian had a fondness for cheap electrical goods. The toaster and the jug and other items had all been replaced with shiny new ones. Every room was dusted and immaculate; flowers sat on all the tables.

We brought Ian home the next day, to lie in this room overlooking the garden and the sea and the birds he fed every day. He loved everything that flew. Planes pass the window, lifting off from the airport, or coming into land, depending on which way the wind is blowing; he had been a pilot once when he was a young man. He stayed with us for nearly a week, never left by himself. Each night around five, the monks would come to chant, and Cambodian people to kneel in my house.

Ian had always said that he wanted to be carried feet first from this place that, in life, he never wanted to leave. The cable car was working again. On the day, when it came time to go, our son arranged for the pall bearers to lift the coffin onto it, standing straight up. Feet first, we said, and were overtaken by wild hilarity.

We buried Ian on a lovely spring day in the first week of November. Before the service, I placed a sheaf of sunflowers on his coffin, and the fisherman’s cap that he’d bought in Greece and wore every day. In front of it, I stood a painting of him by the artist Ken Hunt; he painted it when Ian retired from fifty years of teaching. In the painting, Ian is dark-skinned, silver-haired, a handsome man with the trace of a smile hovering on his lips. The expression is, in some way, a touch wistful, and there was that about him in moments of reflection. I recognised that. The sun shone, hundreds of people came. When the undertaker had asked me how many people they should cater for after the service, I’d said, a couple of hundred. He had shaken his head and observed that people always thought more would come than actually turned up. Perhaps a hundred and twenty, he suggested.

He had got most things right but not this. People had come from far and wide, from London and Australia and all parts of the country. They spilled out of All Saints Church in our local village, and into the adjacent hall, and across the lawn, and onto the pavement. One of my granddaughters-in-law sang ‘Without You’ to open the service. All the family spoke. The monks chanted. A former student read a poem. The eulogy was given by Annette King, a former Cabinet minister, who had been a close friend. Our daughter gave a haunting reading from a short story of mine called ‘Silks’, about the time when Ian had nearly died while we were in Hanoi, and the way it brought us all so close. Our son talked about his father’s unconditional love.

Many of the Cambodian community are taxi drivers from the same company. Ian had once said, in a joking moment, that when he died he wanted all the taxis to stop the traffic in Wellington. They had taken him at his word. As we left the church, a long cavalcade of white taxis with blue lights on their roofs snaked through the city behind the cortège, leaving chaos in its wake. The taxis peeled off at the gates to the cemetery, and then it was just us, thirty or so family with our great-grandchildren, plus all the nieces and nephews.

Ian had chosen the spot where he would lie – in a small dip in the cemetery, surrounded by trees where birds rest and sing. Our daughter led a waiata; although he was being buried here, in our hearts it was time to take my husband back to his roots, for the final farewells from the place he had come, the marae of his childhood.

I knelt beside him.

All the lights are on, he had said that night. Keep going.

We had come so far, he and I; for now, I had the rest of my life to consider how I was going to do it.