I AM STANDING IN MY KITCHEN AS THE SUN PEEKS OVER the horizon, autumn leaves tumbling past the window, the distant sound of waves crashing on the rocky shore. I ponder the state of our fragile family, the love I feel for my two young daughters, wondering what the hell I am going to do.
This time circumstances are dire. My marriage to the man I left France for all those years ago feels over. I am a shadow of my former self. I feel stuck, unsure of where I will go if I leave, but deeply aware of what it will cost me to stay.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a man in uniform, an apparition, on our front deck. He has a funny hat on, and bits of green cloth wrapped round the top of his boots and trouser legs. It is my grandfather in battle fatigues, standing to attention. He speaks to me, then fades in the morning light.
Do not change who you are.
Tears roll down my face, as his words enter my heart. This well-timed piece of grandfatherly advice invites me to remember my true nature, giving me the strength to speak to my husband about our crumbling marriage.
The telly is on in the lounge, and snippets of the 2014 election results carry through to the kitchen. Scott walks in behind me, and I put the jug on.
I hope we make it.
It is Christmas Eve 2016, and Scott and I waltz around each other, competing for space on our tiny kitchen bench. Slicing, mixing, whipping and frying, preparing our contribution to tomorrow’s Christmas feast. The telephone rings, and I catch his eye over whipped cream and stuffing.
‘There are only two people who call us on the landline.’ He smiles.
‘It’s Christmas Eve,’ I say. ‘I bet it’s yours.’
Scott picks up, and I’m right. His unflappable mother is in a flap. Her declining health has us all on tenterhooks, and I feel torn between time with my own family and providing her with the perfect Christmas dinner—one that will probably be her last.
Scott finishes the conversation and hangs up the phone, his heavy silence interrupting my chopping and mixing. I look up and catch a whisper of grief pass across his face. He clears his throat.
‘Mum wants some new potatoes.’
I put down my knife and give him my full attention. It’s not really about the potatoes; it’s more about the hope that our last Christmas with her will be right—and you can’t have Christmas dinner without new potatoes.
‘I thought your dad always did the potatoes?’
‘Yeah, he forgot … You know this year’s been hard on him.’
I look at this tired man with all the love I can muster. I am grateful we have made it this far. ‘Come on, then, while it’s still light. I’ll get a bag.’
I cast a quick glance towards the lounge. The sound of jingling bells and canned laughter confirms the girls are engrossed in a movie. I turn off the stovetop, and follow Scott outside into the warm night.
He takes the handle of the garden fork guarding our modest crop, and plunges it into the soil, the plants trembling in surprise. He instructs me to grasp the foliage and tug, while he digs under and around. As I pull, dusty lumps of gold materialise from the earth, stuck fast to the small tree in my hands. Spindly roots and potato nuggets covered in dirt and worms. I hate worms.
I shake off the dirt, and the potatoes fall to the earth.
Thud … thud thud.
Scott’s large frame casts a lengthy shadow over the garden, then he bends and his silhouette shrinks by half. He brushes the potatoes off and rolls them towards me on the grass. I count them: one, two, three, four … all the way to eleventy.
Scott’s hands disappear for a moment, then reappear with another potato, and another. He knew there were more hiding below. He starts to talk to me about how potatoes work. How the seed nourishes the plant, then the plant grows more potatoes. He picks up a discarded bush and shows me the mushy black lump at its core.
‘It’s not dirt,’ he explains. ‘It’s the seed.’
I watch this beautiful man kneeling in the dirt, his hands buried up to their wrists in earth. Dark brown clumps litter the once-tidy rows, the wheelbarrow dwarfed by the discarded plants lying next to it, their naked roots reaching out like old-lady fingers.
He wipes his brow, reminding me of that Christmas Eve so long ago.
The sun sets as I pick the last of the potatoes from the pile, my bag almost full.
I look up at my husband. His head is hanging low, and the tears silently fall.
Grief has come once again, anticipating the inevitable.
One year later, on 28 December 2017, a year since our last Christmas with Scott’s mother, I am sheltering in our living room, perched between an oversized bookshelf and a desk that teeters under the weight of receipts and papers and books. The weather is poor and my family is staying, so the introvert in me is claiming some private space.
A cell phone rings in a nearby bedroom, and I hear my mother answer in her ‘telephone’ voice, a hangover from her upbringing and her job; even caller display can’t distract her from good manners.
It’s my sister Claire, calling from Wellington, and I can tell there’s bad news on the other end of the line. Oohs and aahs are interspersed with the sucking in of air through pursed lips, heavy sighing and pacing feet. From my hidey-hole in the lounge I can’t yet tell if my sister has a flat tyre or if someone has died.
Mum exits the bedroom and makes a beeline for the lounge. I can feel her cast a lure my way, her voice growing louder, and I realise it’s not a flat tyre.
As she hangs up, I catch her eye, and Mum becomes the reporter—a pivotal and dramatic role she has played many times. My sister’s father-in-law, Brian, has died in his sleep. He was a fit 65, it was very unexpected, and my sister and her family are heading to Auckland in the morning.
I stare at Mum’s tense, squared frame and see the black box humming inside her chest. I watch it emerge from beneath her cotton T-shirt and swinging arms, its metal edges scratched and buffed with age. The gears tick, signalling the recording of important information. The whirring cassettes confirm their readiness to replay the story at any moment. The person with the most information starts, and the person with the most pain wins.
Mum presses play.
‘They’ll never get a funeral director before New Year. Dad’s funeral was the twenty-eighth of December—same day as today. You have no idea how hard it was to get that sorted. They phoned us on Christmas Eve to tell us he would be coming home on the twenty-seventh. We only had four days to organise a funeral, and everything was shut for Christmas. Four days! And, even then, he almost didn’t make it home in time for his own funeral.’
All I can think about is my sister and her family—their shock, their loss, how Claire helped me through the death of my mother-in-law earlier in the year. How we can help them through their grief. And I wonder, how did this become about Erebus? I have to tune out Mum’s words, so I don’t say something I regret. I busy myself with boiling the kettle and opening a bottle of wine.
Long after the phone call has ended, my mother’s pain continues to carve a path towards the mountain. She is on autopilot, claiming this grief story as her own, the details similar or different depending on which point she needs to make, which part she holds on to tightest.
Thirty-eight years later, and Erebus still slinks back into our living room, overshadowing yet another family gathering. The mountain has temporarily damaged Mum’s ability to help her daughter through her grief, prioritising one grief story over another.
Worst of all, I know I have a black box pressing on my own lungs, demanding its voice be heard. If I press play, I know what I will find: lost love, car accidents, betrayal and death, birth stories and miscarriages, my parents, my in-laws. Poor me. Oh, yes. I, too, have a calendar of pain. I can press play and pluck out an assortment of tales to trump my opponent, to clarify our ranking, because everyone knows the person with the most pain wins.
But … most days, I don’t press play.
Most days, I know my own black box will sit there silent, its cold edges rubbed and dented from being battered about. And, over time, it has shrunk, this black box—it grows smaller each time I release the stories held inside of me, each time I recognise the vulnerability and pain in others.
As the shadow of the mountain lifts, I can see Mum’s pain, too.
When I think of Claire’s family’s present tragedy, I wonder how Mum might have dealt with it if she had received support to heal her grief. I wonder if she would have reacted differently, and what she might have said if her own story weren’t already mixed in with the date. How would she have related to my sister, then? Who could she have become without Erebus?
Who would any of us be without our little black box?
So, I say nothing, while Mum repeats her personal trauma of 28 December, using my sister’s news to add to its significance. This is Mum’s story, not mine, and I know it helps if her pain feels important and central and worthy. Perhaps by holding on to this story she, like my grandmother before her, becomes the gatekeeper to the hierarchy of grief, legitimising her pain and sorrow.
Words are rarely enough to convey all the emotions we may experience in a lifetime, although they try. I am unsure if my work will be ample, if there will be capacity in this jumble of words to hold all that I wish to say. Would a recording of all of the conversations I have ever had about my grandfather capture the true essence of my love and my grief? And what about the pain?
I get it. These stories exist inside of me too—sometimes woeful, but also a pleasure—to collate and share when I like. And I know that, even without these stories, I would still be me.
So I choose to remember another Christmas, one we shared with my brother-in-law’s family. I will remember chocolate fondue and Mairangi Surf Club and ‘Go, the Warriors!’ and I will feel grateful for Brian’s life.
These words might surely fall short, but they are the closest I will get today.