ONE MONTH AFTER THE CRASH, ON 28 DECEMBER 1979, the Christmas family said their final farewell to Frank.
My grandfather had been a pall-bearer several times over the years; I find evidence of this both in his diary and in our family storytelling. Frank had a sense of duty, he liked to do a good deed, but as the oldest son I imagine he would have also felt a sense of obligation. My mum recalls his small, measured steps as he held the tiny white coffin of her cousin, Keith Christmas, who died not long after he was born. I find a photo of Frank in his one good suit, probably taken at a wedding or a gala ball of some sort, and I picture him wearing it, standing at the side of a grave, his arm round the shoulder of his younger brother, Bob, as they lower Keith’s tiny coffin into the freshly dug earth.
Frank’s suit was quite at odds with his usual builder’s attire, but something about the fit and the colour and the occasion brings his powerful fragility to life. This is a side of my grandfather I never knew.
The suit maketh the man.
This is not the suit Frank was buried in. This suit would sit in the closet he shared with my grandmother until she found the courage to hand it on.
We don’t throw anything away.
I wonder who supported my grandmother at Frank’s funeral. No one can remember. No one can remember his funeral—but they try, just for me.
‘I’d been out in the garden digging potatoes,’ my mother recalls. In my mind’s eye I can see her there, in the garden, red-faced and dirty and crying over a pile of golden nuggets. ‘After they called to say they’d identified him, I think Mum called the undertaker, who then called Auckland. They helped us plan the rosary for the twenty-seventh. He was meant to be on a flight that day, arriving for the rosary that night. Well, he didn’t arrive … Finally, he was rushed to the funeral directors, and we all went there just to see the coffin and his plaque. Then we had to rush to the church to arrive before the hearse, so his body could be brought in. He almost didn’t make his own funeral. It didn’t cost us anything—that was all paid for by Air New Zealand. It was the least they could bloody do.
‘I don’t remember Dad’s funeral, I don’t even remember who spoke. Could have been Uncle Jack or Uncle Onie. I just don’t know. Denise and I had a word with the two funeral directors afterwards and told them we were disappointed we didn’t get a chance to see Dad, and one of them said, “Oh, we would never have allowed that.” Well, I know for a fact that it wouldn’t happen nowadays.’
Like my mum, my aunt Denise doesn’t remember much, either.
‘I don’t really remember his funeral, but it was standing room only. He had a mahogany coffin and it was engraved with 15.3 / 2 / 4. That was eerie,’ she says. ‘Pall-bearers? Could have been his apprentice, Larry Scrivener, or maybe John Kendall or Stan Florence … I just don’t remember. I do know they didn’t play the last post. It’s a shame, really, because he was allowed it, and he could have been buried in one of the RSA plots at the cemetery, but Mum was worried she wouldn’t be able to be buried with him so she didn’t do it.’
My aunt Pauline’s memories are just as empty. ‘They didn’t do an order of service back then. I don’t know who spoke. I have no idea what hymns we had, or who the pall-bearers were. No idea. I do know Mum didn’t want the last post played, because she just wouldn’t have coped. I remember staring at the coffin wondering if he was really in there, you know?’
As for Brett, he says the funeral had no significance for him. ‘It was just part of the expected ritual—the rosary, then the funeral. I don’t think I did a reading or carried the coffin or anything. The funeral was pretty surreal. I remember people tiptoeing around me. I remember that.
‘That gravesite means nothing to me. Isn’t it bizarre? It’s just a part of that blur, really. That’s what you did. You went there, and you buried the casket. I don’t have an emotional connection to it whatsoever, but all this stuff [the boxes of Frank’s belongings] … Absolutely, I have a huge emotional connection with it. It’s much more important to me.’
Brett tells me that he did make his father a promise that day: ‘to study medicine and to do very well, and I did’.
It is difficult to hear my mother, aunts and uncle share these sparse memories of their father’s funeral. I have mourned through several significant funerals myself, but I can still remember the pall-bearers and the eulogies and even the photographs displayed. My family prides itself on memory and record-keeping, and yet no one can shed any light on Frank’s funeral.
However, they do all recall one strange fact: neither Eileen nor Frank’s mother, Emily, discussed the wake. As a consequence, both women hosted luncheons at their respective houses, and—isolated in their grief—left loved ones to choose where to spend their time and tears for Frank.
An avalanche is rumbling down the mountain, revealing the scarred landscape of our past while also swamping everything in its path.
It is Brett who has the last word.
‘Speaking of tools, when Dad’s body was identified, I walked out into the shed for a couple of hours, and I got some wood and I scribed it all up and cut it and I made a crucifix. The joins were partially sunk in, and I had all the angles perfect, and I said—’
He chokes on his words.
‘“Here, would you put that in the coffin with Dad, please?” It was my gift to him.’
Brett’s wife, Helen, gently holds his shaking shoulders. ‘And he would have taught you to do it perfectly. They would have been mitred to the exact degree.’
‘Yes,’ Brett says. ‘And that’s why his tools are very significant.’
At just thirteen years old, my uncle took his father’s tools and used them to make a crucifix, just as the carpenters and recovery staff at Scott Base did. He used the same tools—saw, chisel, hammer, plane. He, too, devoted his time and attention to each cut, each tap, each stroke. He sanded it and touched it and worked his grief into the grain of the wood that would lie with his father beneath the shadow of Taranaki.
This is sacred work.
This is how we honour the dead.