Vicki Anderson
Seven years on, and the grief is still cruel to a parent. In part two of our series, the family of Matthew McEachen, who was killed in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake, tell how the loss has changed their lives.
In 2013, the McEachen family moved out of their family home in Northwood for earthquake repairs. ‘‘We put everything in our garage and moved into a one-bedroom motel for six weeks,’’ says Jeanette McEachen.
‘‘When we went home we didn’t want to be there, in some ways it was running away from memories.’’
They took back out only what they needed. ‘‘A couple of sheets, a white dinner set, a few towels … We were amazed by what was left. We had two garage sales, giving things away. Whatever was left we split it into big black bags and took it to the different charities.
‘‘It was a real cleansing thing. We don’t want stuff around us. Family is more important than anything else.’’
At the table, her daughter Sarah McEachen leans forward a little. A silver necklace around her neck glints in the sun.
‘‘A woman from West Melton, who also lost someone in the earthquake, made that necklace,’’ says Jeanette, gesturing to Sarah.
‘‘We all have several ... they have an imprint of Matthew’s fingerprint.’’
Obtaining the fingerprint from police wasn’t easy.
‘‘Police were reluctant to release it to us. I convinced them it meant nothing to them and everything to us,’’ says Jeanette.
‘‘If I’m feeling anxious and can’t stop thinking of Matthew I wear the necklace and fiddle with it, I put my thumb in and out of it all day ... Or I wear the ring that Matthew was wearing when he passed away. It’s the little things that bring us closer to him.’’
Sarah sweeps the hair from her neck to reveal a tattoo. ‘‘It’s the Egyptian symbol of life after death,’’ she says. ‘‘It was the band’s symbol. Most of Matti’s friends have it.’’
Last February, seated around this same table, the family of Rachel Conley wore the fingerprint necklaces they’d had made, too.
Conley – who was killed on Colombo St near the Southern Ink studio where Matthew had been due to tattoo her – was the only American citizen who died in the earthquake.
‘‘Her family didn’t have the support that we had here,’’ says Jeanette. ‘‘We started emailing each other and went through everything, every step of the way, for six years. I think it was a huge healing thing for them.’’
After six years, the Conley and McEachen families finally met when the Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial officially opened. ‘‘They came over to New Zealand and stayed with us.’’
Jeanette remembers a time when she was ‘‘obsessed’’ with visiting sites with links to her son.
‘‘We could go to the spot on Colombo St where he died, we could go to the memorial wall, we could go to his seat, we could go to Harewood where his ashes are or we could go to Avonhead.
‘‘Every weekend we were going around to these five places.’’
She would visit her son’s grave twice a day. ‘‘As a mother I thought ‘what else can I do?’ There wasn’t allowed to be a leaf anywhere near him, fresh flowers had to be there, every day I did that and sometimes I would go at lunchtime, too.
‘‘I guess we were going through earthquakes and all this earthquake talk and whether the police were going for manslaughter charges and all of these different things, it was almost consuming me.’’
The strands of grief are still there, just beneath the surface, and you never know when someone is going to tug on them.
‘‘A guy came into work to put a screen in on one of the reception windows,’’ says Jeanette.
‘‘I said ‘what lovely tattoos, did you get them done in Christchurch’? He said ‘yes I did’. Then he turned around and looked at Matthew’s photo on my desk and he said ‘oh ,my God, you’re Matti’s mum’ and he got quite emotional.
‘‘I can be at the post office or about to get a massage, it happens all the time.
‘‘It is hard because it brings it all to the surface again, that he’s not here. But I like people to tell me that they knew him because I know he is not forgotten.’’
It’s different for Bruce, Matthew’s dad. ‘‘Blokes don’t talk about it. It’s a genderbased thing for some reason. No-one ever says to me ‘you must be Matt’s dad’.’’
It’s seven years on, but Bruce thinks it is wrong to measure the aftermath of an earthquake in calendar years.
‘‘I think for a lot of people in Christchurch, it’s the wrong way of measuring it. There isn’t an office environment or sports group or social club where you can’t turn around and say ‘that person is not the same person they were seven years ago’ – they’ve still got the stress, they have not got their life back together. The unit of measure should be how long it takes you to get over what happened,’’ he says.
‘‘I do not think that is going to go away until we pull down the last building and write the last insurance cheque and get on with it... or someone says a sorry or two. A simple admission, a ‘sorry I cocked up’, that would go a long way. It doesn’t happen because the suits, the lawyers, don’t let people say it.’’
On December 14 last year, Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel presented Bruce with a civic award, saying he put ‘‘hundreds of hours of unpaid time into the development of the Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial and to supporting other victims’ families’’.
A day later, and as they have done annually since 2011, Bruce and Jeanette quietly presented the Matthew McEachen Scholarship to a student at the Design and Arts College
‘‘It’s not awarded to the one who is obviously going to do well, but the one who tries the hardest and showed the most potential,’’ Jeanette says. ‘‘That legacy carries on.’’
‘‘It’s hard for the families who come across every year from Japan, China, Philippines for the anniversary,’’ adds Bruce.
‘‘They struggle with the lack of accountability. Every year, they ask me the same question – ‘is anyone ever going to get prosecuted over these buildings?’
‘‘That’s a real hard one to deal with. In their countries they say someone would be held accountable very quickly. Every year they come across and the police tell them the same thing, ‘we’re almost there’. They can’t understand how in a first-world country like New Zealand, nothing happens.’’
‘‘Taxpayers have spent close to $10 million on investigating the Canterbury Television (CTV) building etc and you won’t get a result. We’ve wasted that money and the time of 185 people’s families, having to go through this same bullshit every year, every anniversary is the same thing.’’
‘‘It’s like we are different versions of ourselves now,’’ says Sarah.
‘‘Matti’s saying was ‘no way to happiness, happiness is the way’, that just sums him up.
‘‘Everything he did was to make himself and others happy. It has made me stop and think more about the world and my impact on others.’’
The cliche is that time heals but Jeanette disagrees. ‘‘You just learn to cover up and live with it. They say the hardest thing to cope with is the death of your child and that is right, I know that now, it is the worst thing.
‘‘All he did was go off to work … For a while I was quite bitter that, of all the people, why are the good ones taken?
‘‘We had to fight to have a little prem baby that survived, bought him up well and had a perfect family and it changes overnight.
‘‘I think I am more spiritual now. Someone said to me once that our lives are mapped out for us, what will be will be. I was quite bitter but now I think we were lucky to have 25 years with him – he taught us so much.’’
Earlier, she’d told me something that had rendered me silent.
‘‘I don’t see in colour now. Everything is black and white since Matthew died.’’
We walk down the hallway. At the end is Matt Parkin’s portrait of Matti. It almost seems to have a glow around it, it is so vibrant.
We bid farewell and I walk down the street, away from their home. At the end of the street there’s a park bench with a gold plaque. I stop to read it. The bench was moved from the red zone.
The plaque reads: ‘‘In remembrance of Matthew McEachen’’. I’m just about to leave when a monarch butterfly appears and lands on the edge of the seat.
The strands of grief are everywhere.
‘‘It is hard because it brings it all to the surface again, that he’s not here. But I like people to tell me that they knew him because I know he is not forgotten.’’
Jeanette McEachen