November Please

A tree of his fingerprints

City agleam. Trees November-bare. Spiky branches skying death, heavenward, earthward, surely incapable of ever again sustaining leaf-life. Somehow there will be a spring, just not one that’s easy to believe in.

This month my uncle died after a short period of medically-sustained life. He was 54, with four children and one grandchild, a partner; one surviving parent, my grandmother Joanie; and one surviving brother, my dad. For those short long days he lay connected to a ventilator looking all the part alive. Chest up and down; warm hands. But then the tests: no life in his brain stem. Alive-dead. I don’t understand.

He had suddenly collapsed at work. His workmates administered CPR and bundled him into the work van when told it would take an hour for an ambulance to arrive. Those men were his circulation. Their actions gave his family time to hold his warm hand. The medical workers spoke to my uncle directly as they narrated their ministrations. They found out his favourite songs and played country music for him. They helped my cousins make a tree of his fingerprints.

On the night my uncle died I went outside and faced a colossal weeping willow. I parted its great dancing curtains and placed my heart against its silver-barked trunk. I closed my eyes and saw my uncle’s playful face and body language, like on the October day that he’d dropped me and Tracy at the Catholic church in Montrose. I hadn’t been in years, but felt it was somehow right to go with her. My uncle was bemused but only happy to help. He loped into the car all jaunty limbs and goofy smile. He waited for us on the lane afterwards, and he reached for Tracy’s hand when she returned to him.

Or the September day my dad arrived from New Zealand and fell asleep in Joanie’s easy chair. It was only the afternoon but he was near-drugged with jet-lag. My uncle, standing at the Stanley oven (never sitting, he couldn’t sit still), looked over at his oldest brother with a combination of exaggerated ruefulness and genuine affection, then made eye contact with me and laughed. I laughed, too. He had made a moment of connection from nothing, just because he could. That’s what he did. He then loped off to make tea for his youngest daughter. That’s what he did, too.

I haven’t said these words in years, but it feels right. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

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Until next month, may a tree give you comfort,
H x

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Archive Please

November 2020 (Edinburgh)
“I have not known the sparkly flash of a corporate-style achievement in isolation and for that I am glad. I am learning that work is not the way to freedom, unless that work is care, which should be all of our work, together.”

November 2021 (Waiheke Island)
“In November I wasn’t much of a person, I was more of a worker. Not only the work-for-wages type, but also the work-for-deliverance type. A person in need of deliverance is still a person, but the worker monicker suited me fine.”

November 2022 (Waiheke Island)
"The island is a retirement village for those who are deluded enough to think they’ve played their cards right, but who were merely dealt all the cards”

November 2023 (Waiheke Island)
"The end of a hard day leads not to rest but more darkness to fill up the eyes. So in this wash of queasiness I want to remind myself of last month’s permanent marker polemic: a shared humanity is our guide. Sometimes spiky but always shared; humanity as an immensity, a remembrance, a wide attention, a woven existence, beyond domination.”

November 2024 (Edinburgh)
"There’s been a crazed white noise in place of words. “Watching a live-streamed genocide” has become a stock phrase, hasn’t it, but the relentless failure of fairness and justice really does do something to even the witnesses.”