Death, and other things like it

It feels like the world is surrounded by death recently. Perhaps post-COVID, we’re all a little sensitive to it. Around me, I’ve felt hemmed in by a marching band of public and private deaths. The announcement of Sam Neill’s passing yesterday – that mighty tōtara who, it seems by the tributes, lived life very much on his own terms and stayed true to his beliefs – was just the latest. He made being a palaeontologist cool when I was a kid, and now he’s off to that great Jurassic Park in the beyond.

A nice guy. A good life. There are worse ways to be remembered.

On the personal front, I recently discovered an old friend had died through social media. That’s the trouble with no longer living in New Zealand. You miss stuff. Or find out too late to do anything about it.

An old friend isn’t exactly how I want to remember Gary. It’s just what our friendship became as I drifted past my 20s and moved out of the tight friend circle we were both in then. I don’t feel qualified to write any sort of tribute to him. We’d reconnected briefly when I discovered he had cancer a few years ago, but didn’t really keep in touch. The person I knew well 15 years ago would have changed dramatically during that time.

But from the tributes I’ve seen from others who knew him up to his death, some things stayed the same. He still loved KFC and birthdays (he put together a playlist for one of mine, which I now wish I’d kept). He remained a generous man. He loved his two daughters more than anything. He kept that big boom of a voice, the one that made him the presenter of Newstalk ZB’s Time Saver traffic for over nine years. And man oh man he loved his stand-up comedy. That was the guy I knew, and while I have no belief in heaven or hell, I want to think that somehow if we all fragment into a billion motes of stardust after we die, that bits of Gary will continue to exist in the things and people he loved for all eternity.

The title of this post is a little glib – because there isn’t anything quite like death. I want to say it’s the finality of it. The fact that even if you got to say goodbye, it doesn’t just happen once. You’ll say it again and again with the passing of time, at every milestone, every anniversary, every time you reach for the phone and realise their number no longer connects.

I’m reminded of a famous quote from Thornton Wilder’s book The Bridge of San Luis Rey - the inspiration for so many brilliant works from novels to movies, TV series, songs and art.

“…we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Goodbye, old friend. Till we meet again, whatever form that may take.