Mate are you alright
Sunday Star Times Apr 09 2017
The world goes on, even as you're dying. And in the shocked, stunned morning when we're driving to the funeral, the car radio will be singing and laughing and and promising big, big savings at Briscoes.
I talked this week to an old friend who might be dying, if you believe his oncologist, and who might have plenty of time yet, if you believe the guy he's seeing for alternative treatment, and I want to believe that guy so very much.
He has been on a road trip, visiting the places he used to know. In Carterton he found a Wellington underworld old friend who burst into tears to see him again and said: "They told me ten years ago you died in a bike crash."
He's a builder, a craftsman in fact. He has the best stories. There was a plumber he worked with who nearly died. It happened on the roof of a building in Belmont, in the strip of shops on the side of Lake Rd. So much bustle, so many people. A hundred thousand cars, trucks and buses pass those shops every minute, and all the students of Takapuna Grammar come past on their way to Hell Pizza and McDonald's.
Up on the roof, though, he was on his own. He had some cutting to do, and he slipped, and what plumbers tend to work with is sharp, sharp metal. When you make a mistake and the slicing happens, it can go very deep and it can happen all in an instant. Suddenly you can be losing blood like you've burst a water main. You can pass out, as he did, in a large red pool on the roof of the shop.
At some point he came around, but he was too weak to move. He could hear the world below: angry car drivers sitting on their horns, school kids chattering, the rest of his crew working down below, firing the circular saw, swapping banter, whistling while the radio promised big big savings at Briscoes.
"Well, this is it, then," he thought, lying there, bleeding, losing strength. But it wasn't. At some point before it was too late the guys down below stopped whistling and bantering, said: "He's been pretty quiet up there" and "mate are you all right?" and came looking.
I wonder what would might pass through my mind if it were me. It's not an idle thought, because we have plumbing issues at our house, and I am hapless. I might think: "Glad I didn't leave anything going on the stove." I might think: "Or did I?"
Maybe I might think to myself: "At least this is kind of peaceful, and not a suffering beyond all imagining," in which case maybe my last thoughts would be about children in Syria and a world of monsters and unspeakable cruelty.
You think of the the people you love, though, don't you? When you hear that your friend's last words to the love of his life were "you'll be all right" it just tears you up.
This week I saw a boy of 18Â have to say goodbye to his mother. His father died when he was a kid and he's still a kid, really, and she loved him as much as any mother can and he was there at the handle of the coffin just taken with grief and he needed the whole world to hold him and we did.
And an old friend at his father's funeral last weekend read out a letter his Dad had written in 1944 to his little sister whom he had protected (from their alcoholic father – himself wrecked by the Great War) and who he now had to leave behind, because he was 14 and joining the navy. His letter described the three meals a day and warm bed they were giving him, and his first sight of the sea, and all these things they had never seen, and he was writing to reassure her that though he was gone to war, she should not worry and he was still looking out for her and he was sharing joy with her.
The smallest and largest thing in a life is that someone will care about you. Even if it's just "mate, are you all right?"