Remembering the fallen
A surfeit of famous funerals makes you think about some of your own friends who checked out early.
Lou Reed. David Bowie. Cilla Black. Prince. Harper Lee. Lemmy. Merle Haggard. The diminutive comedian Ronnie Corbett, who was quite possibly buried in a suitcase, he was so wee.
It’s been a rough few years for the famous. With every passing month, another cultural figurehead seems to draw their last breath.
These people all touched my life to a greater or lesser degree, though I knew none of them personally, unless you count a tetchy phone interview with Lou Reed in 2003, in which he bragged about the length of his penis (‘‘Eleven inches,’’ he claimed, ‘‘but it’s pretty cold here in New York today.’’)
Most recently, we lost the most charismatic boxer who ever lived, Muhammad Ali, and as I read yet another eloquent obituary about his triumphs and defeats, his personality and his politics, it set me thinking about some of the people I knew who had checked out early, their own obits just a few scattered lines in their local newspapers but their lives equally worthy of celebration.
As I hoed into my breakfast poached egg, a roll-call of the fallen started scrolling through my head.
Elsie was a tiny, wiry Londoner I would meet around the town, heading out with a shopping bag to get her ‘‘messages’’: a loaf or bread, a little milk, some soup for one.
Her shaky voice was locally famous: for several decades, she hosted a radio show on Nelson’s Fresh FM, where she would play the Andrews Sisters, Bing, Vera Lynn.
When she died in Wellington, her son-in-law Kevin took the ferry south with her coffin stashed under the sleeping platform in the back of his panel van so she could be buried next to her late husband Tom in Motueka.
Kevin, incidentally, died in Wellington’s Cliffhanger Hillclimb motorbike race in 2014, on the same dangerous corner where another rider had died two years earlier. A gentle, soft-spoken soul of 59, I’d been in Colombia with him a few years earlier for my son’s wedding.
Kevin found the high-altitude atmosphere of Bogota tough, having survived a massive heart attack just a few months earlier, but he was an optimist, not a complainer.
He told me one night how lucky he felt to still be on ‘‘the right side of the grass’’, but Kevin’s luck was to run out soon after. A battalion of fellow bikers formed a roaring guard of honour on the way to his funeral service.
Larry was for many years my closest friend. I met him in Dublin during the 80s, and slept on a spare mattress stashed behind his couch for far too long while I looked for my own flat. He put up with me then, and years later, I put up with him when he moved in with me after emigrating to New Zealand.
By the time he was laid low by cancer decades later, Larry was more of a New Zealander than I was: a fluent Maori speaker, he was carried out of the funeral service to a rousing haka, a Tino Rangatiratanga sticker slapped on the side of his coffin.
Speed kills, the TV traffic ads used to say, and I can confirm that this is true. My mate Lance worked for Maori Affairs in Gisborne and deeply loved fast cars. After saving hard for several years, he bought an ex-paddy wagon police van and drove it at terrifying speeds at all times.
Lance was such a hoon, I once hitchhiked to a party in Tokomaru Bay the same afternoon he was driving up there in an empty car. His brick boot did for him in the end as he peeled off that very same coast road a year later, and hit a tree.
Another friend, Marcus, was smart, stylish, word-perfect in Public Enemy lyrics, and never met an intoxicant he didn’t like. He would stay up for days on end, high as any amount of kites, carousing with assorted ne’er-dowells around the town.
Sometimes he’d show up at our place, smashed as a shipwreck and smiling like Buddha, at 4am, on the off chance we might still be up. Dude, we’re in bed, I would say. Go home.
But home wasn’t a happy place for the poor bugger, and it was depression that cut short his life in the end, rather than the drugs he used to self-medicate against it.
I knew others, too, who left the land of the living in tragic ways. When his marriage split up, a former work colleague with a physical disability laid his battered crutches on the deck and slipped quietly off the back of a ferry to Stewart Island.
There are more, too, of course, some too personal to mention here. But as I thought of all these missing friends on a bright and frosty winter’s morning, the prevailing feeling wasn’t sadness or loss.
I was more thankful than maudlin. I felt fortunate to have met these fine people on the way past, and fortunate, too, that I now had the chance to throw a few lines after them into the void.
Alongside Ali and Bowie, Prince and Cilla, and the rest, it’s important to acknowledge that every one of us lives among their own community of lesser-known ghosts, carting around the memories of our dearly departed friends and family until the day comes when we join their number.
In the meantime, it’s bloody good to be alive, isn’t it?