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Chapter Eight

My mother passed away early in the morning on the twentieth of August 1952 at Queenstown Hospital. She was buried four days later at a cemetery amongst the loveliest countryside Otago had to offer, overlooking Lake Hayes, amidst deciduous trees displaying a myriad of splendid autumn colour. It was only then that I fully realised the depth of my sister’s love, the depth of my father’s compassion, the wonderful support of our relatives from afar and my family’s church community, for which I had no previous empathy. The church service had been nice. Charlie Owens did the eulogy, and Reverent Sinclair spoke about life after death. We sang hymns and heard about the joyful resurrection.

My view of death as an end of existence was hard to come to terms with. My grief was overwhelming. The memory of my mother, the years she was with us, the many happy experiences, her love, her caring, and her understanding of things precious to me.

I felt isolated as I didn’t have the religious peace of my father and Rachel. My problem was I was questioning their beliefs, which were different to those I had developed, and I felt guilty. But how could their trust in teachings of creation, occurring just a few thousand years ago, be true? I was reading about geologic events that occurred many millions of years ago, which not only cast doubts in my mind about the source of their peace but left me with a view of death as a permanent departure from the living.

I was coming to terms with the fact that my mother was no longer there and everything about her had gone: her warm body, her voice, her smell, her hugs, her visual appearance, never again to exist. And yet, I did believe in a person’s intelligent soul, and Rachel and I had come out of her body, so our souls must be connected. That was something I could grasp. It was like a beautiful painting of our family, of our animals and Skipper on our farm, with the vivid colours of autumn in the background, but with only an outline where my mother stood, and nothing but a white void in her place. Somehow, I had to put her vision back in the painting.

My mother always understood why I felt sad, unhappy or fearful, while my dad didn’t notice, or at least never showed that he did. He had his church and his Bible, and that seemed as though it was the answer to all anguish – his rock, his place to go when events of his life were against him. Even now, he and Rachel had a certain comfort which was not available to me, and I suppose they may have felt my depth of grieving to be a little unnecessary. At certain times, I even wished I was religious as it seemed to take away a lot of the pain of their loss.

Thomas and Rose

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