A eulogy for my father, July 28th 1940 to May 31st 2008

My Dad passed away last May. I wrote and delivered a eulogy for him at his funeral at the time but couldn’t find it in me to post it here. Since Mum died a month or so ago I decided that now was the time to do it. Here it is…

Before I begin I would like to thank all of you here on behalf of my mother, my brother and myself, for your efforts large and small to be here today, to help us mark my fathers passing.

I am honoured to be here.

I am honoured to be here to speak to you all.

I am honoured to be here to speak to you about my father.

Each of you here had your own relationship with my Dad, each of you has your own set of memories and your own word picture that describes this man. I don’t presume to know the man that you knew. But I hope that, in this eulogy that I offer, you will recognise some part of the man that we all knew, the man that is no longer amongst us, the man who will never be gone until all of us here have passed.

My father was raised in the in-between generation, born in the years immediately before the end of World War Two, what they call the “silent generation”. A generation with one foot firmly planted in the 1940’s with the other placed unsteadily in the 1960’s. He was blessed, or some would say cursed, with an independent wife, one with the expectation of working and not content to be kept at home. His children were raised in the sixties and seventies, challenging times for parents with the traps of drug use and pre-marital sex, neither of which I believe Dad had been prepared for in the lesson plan his father had given him.

At times my Dad would be presented with the need to cope with a behaviour from my brother or I that he didn’t have an pre-made answer for, one that he would just have to cope with on the spot.

When my Dad was in this situation he always fell back on the core values that he had learned and tried to impress on us boys the importance of doing the right thing. My Dad didn’t read books about child-rearing, he relied on common sense values. My Dad didn’t know who Dr Spock was and would have thought he was an ass if he did.

One school vacation I recall my father pulling me out of bed early one morning after I had been at a party at my brother’s flat at Okareka. He asked me if I had been drinking and driving. Of course I denied this. He dragged me outside and pointed out the punga fronds jammed in my windscreen wipers, collected during my not-quite-straightforward trip home through the “Blue Lake Windies” a few hours before. He looked me fair in the eye and said “Don’t be a bloody idiot Geof”. That was the end of it, that’s how my Dad believed kids should be raised. Straight to the point, no buggering around, we always knew what the standard was that he expected.

I use the word values here a lot because I think it’s a word that has real meaning when you try to describe my father.

My father can be defined in part I think by his sense of honour, by his understanding of right and wrong. He was a fiercely loyal man, loyal to his family, loyal to his friends and loyal to the values that he learned from his parents. My father has always striven to be fair above all, sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn’t, always he tried. These same character traits are ones that both my brother and I have, learned or inherited it doesn’t matter, what he was, so have we become.

My father had a quick temper, a temper that flared, ran hot and died just as quickly. That could be thought a flaw if it were not combined with another part of his character, his difficulty in holding a grudge. He and I talked about this one day, it came up because he knew that I had struggled at times with that same temper. The way he put it was “call the man a bastard at 4 o’clock, drink his beer at 6″. This pair of traits my brother and I have, learned or inherited it doesn’t matter, what he was, so have we become.

My father was never, in my experience, an overtly religious man, although there were a number of times in my life that I heard him refer to Jesus Christ. One time was the day I caused his hand to be pinched between an engine and a gearbox in a car he was working on in the driveway. Another time was when I absentmindedly dropped the bonnet of a VW on his head as he was welding the hinge. And of course he witnessed vigourously the day I caused him to weld his wristwatch to his arm.

I remember the bonnet incident well because immediately after he had called on Jesus there was a pause and then he said ‘Geof?”. Of course I said nothing. He said “are you still there” as if he half expected Jesus to have whipped me away for my own safety. I said yes, I was still there. He said “would you mind holding onto the bonnet a little tighter mate?”. My father forgave me often.

My father provided for us an example of the strength of a man who truly loves his wife. My fathers example to us was that a man could strive to have a relationship with a woman based on love and mutual respect, not on an imbalance of power. I think it is telling that of all my friends at school I have been, for the past 25 years, the only one whose parents remained married.

My father and my mother gave us both an example of an honest and faithful relationship where one could use the odd Anglo-Saxon word without it foretelling the end of anything. My father, my parents, gave both of us boys a hope that we also could form such a relationship. My Dad showed us that we could be strong men without resorting to the misogynism of the classic Kiwi bloke. What he was, so have we become.

My father was, is, will always be the most capable and creative man I ever met. I cannot recall him ever botching anything he turned his hand to. He understood materials and engineering innately without the need for a formal education in them. In fact he had the typical Kiwi disdain for the educated man who could not “do”. Unfortunately I cannot claim to have gained this talent from him, nails are doomed to buckle under my hammer. But I learned enough from him to respect, without reservation, men who can “do”.

My father feared nothing. In all my recollection of my Dad I cannot recall him ever being afraid of anything (even the oncoming headlights of a forest ranger). My brother gained his creative skills, I scored the lack of fear thing.
My father was many more things than this I know, you know it too. Some of you will recall his generosity, I will always remember his sense of humour. My father never smirked or smiled, he laughed, all of him, from his belly to his eyebrows. His hands would lift off the table, his head would tip back and he would just laugh.

My Dad told the best hunting stories. I have tried to read the odd hunting book over the years, I always threw them to one side because they just didn’t have the sense of being there that my Dad’s “boof-whack” stories always did.

My father was an interested and interesting man.

And finally most of all my father gave us boys an example of a man whose imperfections provided the colour in his character while his strengths gave his character its wonderful shape.

My only brother and I are who we are because of who this man was. We will always miss him.

In closing I will recite a poem by W.H.Auden called “Stop The Clocks”, you may know it.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever:
I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Good-bye Dad, may the wind always be in your favour and the deer be numerous & curious where-ever you are now. Kia Kaha Mum.

A eulogy for my mother August 12 1940 – March 7 2009

It was an American essayist named Joseph Bottum who once said “The fundamental pattern for any community is the congregations at it’s funerals”. What you can see as you look around this morning is the pattern of the community of Karli Birchall, you are all connected to her somehow. It’s a beautiful pattern and my mother would love you all for being here today.

This eulogy has been very difficult for me to write. When I wrote for my father only a few months ago the words came out like the rhythm of rain and just fell onto the page in front of me.

My relationship with my mother was different to how I interacted with my father. It has been a struggle for me to find ways for me to translate a complex and long standing personal experience into something that you can all understand and hopefully relate to your own relationship with my mother.

Just as a parent is not supposed to have a favourite amongst her children so are children not supposed to have a favour one parent above another. But we do. And I did. Do not misunderstand me, I admired my father deeply but I always knew that my bond with my mother was a gift to me that I wasn’t required to share with anyone else.

I am a most fortunate boy.

I have been blessed to be born of, raised by and loved all of my life by a warm, funny, talented, intelligent and formidable woman.

I learned early in my life that my mother was not like other mothers that I knew. My mother didn’t do doilies, interior decorating or afternoon tea. Nor did she take any shit from my father. I know my father loved my mother absolutely until the end of his life but I would guess that sometimes he may have felt that he bit off more than he could chew.

My mother had a wonderful sense of the ridiculous and her sense of humour and her lack of pretension enriched my life and developed in me that same sense of humour.

To illustrate what it was like to be Karli’s child I remember vividly the night that she removed her false teeth, brushed her hair forward over her head and chased us two small boys like a kehua down the darkened hallway at the Waipa Village house. I have never been so terrified in all my life and judging from the squeals issuing from my brother, neither has he.

I am a most fortunate boy.

I have often wondered how my mother came to be the person that she was. She was an unconventional woman in a time when that was actually a hard thing to be. Today we worship the individualist, social pressures on a young wife in the 1960’s were far different from the expectations that are here today.

Born in 1940, she was raised by another uncommon woman, my grandmother, during the years of sacrifice when my granddad was away in the war. Gran encouraged in her an independence of spirit and a strength of character, things that would come to define her as an adult. Gran also encouraged her in developing a deep love of her country, a taste for kaimoana and a distaste for shoes, things that would also stay with her for the whole of her life.

She spent the first two decades of her life on a small farm in the middle of nowhere and then in a small country town on the edge of nowhere. At the end of that part of her life she met my Dad, married and moved with him to a even tinier cold, foggy, class-riven forestry village, which by some miracle just happened to be smack in the middle of some of the best shooting country in the North Island.

My fathers master plan where he got to go off shooting all the time with his mates and my mum got to raise two children alone was soon frustrated as my mother promoted herself to number 2 gun and beat the dog to the passenger seat every time.

My Dad was always conscious of how lucky he was as he watched some of the glares of his mates wives as they would load up and head out to raise mayhem in the forests and swamps of the Central North Island.

While my mum doggedly undertook the role of hunter alongside my father I always felt that she really savoured the role of gatherer more. Her eyes always lifted off the spoor trail and searched out the undergrowth for a ripe blackberry or an elusive orchid. The orchid would often find itself dug from it’s home and thrust into her jacket pocket to be brought back and rehoused in that wonderful jungle of a garden that followed her from house to house. The blackberry would be thrust with dirty thumb between our teeth followed by a hiss to “stop fighting with your brother”.

People who should know always say that taste and smell create the strongest memories in all of us and for myself I can create now the dusty taste of a ripe blackberry crushed by my tongue against the roof of my mouth and be transported back 40 years in a moment.

I am a most fortunate boy.

As a child I believe I was beaten more frequently than, for example my son has ever been, but truthfully less frequently than I deserved. My mum did not believe that the way to a boys heart was via a belt or a wooden spoon. She rationed my father to one smack at a time, believing that one smack corrected the child, any more and you were doing it for your own pleasure.

This does not mean that my mum was the soft one, I recall one time at the age of seven or eight when a stalled lawnmower prompted me to practice some of the oafish language I had learned from my brother & his friends. From thin air my mother appeared and transported me by the ear to the bathroom where I discovered the pleasure of soap spread thickly over a toothbrush. As you all must know it didn’t fix my potty mouth but since then I have formed the habit of being more careful in my assessment of audience.

You knew my mother by a variety of names. Who she was to you really depended on when you got to know her. For her siblings and parents she was always shrimp. Those of her who knew her from school knew her as Carol or Carolyn. When we were kids my brother and I always knew how to place someone who called by how they asked for her at the door. As an adult by far the most common name she went by was Karli.

My mum had a grandfather who served in South Africa. It was he who named her Karli, a Swahili word meaning fierce. I asked her one day what she was like as a child. She replied “prickly”. From the start mum was the kind who hurt easily and responded in kind even quicker. Fierce she was and fierce she remained.

My mother was not defined by her roles as someone’s wife or mother. My mum was an artist, an amateur palaeontologist, a botanist and a collector of strange things. Mum wasn’t a big city girl, she thrilled to the feeling of a flounder under her toes and a spear in her hand, she loved the game of watching for the wave as she danced the tuatua twist. Crouching down by the fish smoker, tending the fire, she lived the life she should have.

This country was her country. I can’t think of anywhere else where she would have fitted in, I have to think that she was made for this land. Her foot prints are all over this country, from the Cape to the Auckland Islands, from the Chathams to the Urewera. I know no-one personally who I can say loved this country more.

Now John here was kind enough to offer me some advice about eulogies the last time I found myself standing here. He observed that it’s common for these things to get a little off the rails and become more about the speaker than the subject. I hope this hasn’t happened here but now I must be frank with you.

I am terribly torn by the fact that I must stand here in front of you. Not to be too blunt, I am angry to be here today. I am filled full of resentment of the unjust and arbitrary nature of the world we live in and the cruel way in which my mother has been cheated of the time that was due to her.

I am an atheist. My mother was an atheist. My grandmother was an atheist. A family history of non-conformism and rationalism has it’s shortcomings. On a day such as today atheism holds no comfort, no soft fold of cloth to hide the truth to come. No faith to draw strength from, no vision of an afterlife to look to. All I have is the threadbare realisation that a wonderful woman is going to her grave today and I have a small family grown suddenly smaller.

When I think of my mother now I do not think of the trials that she had to endure or the end that was hers, my mother made a poor victim. For me and I hope for you, she will forever be that skinny little girl, feet apart, shaking her fist in the face of those who said she could not.

I am a most fortunate boy.

Thank you all for coming here for my mother, for my brother and for me.

Happy Birthday Maggie!

Ha bloody ha

My step-daughter and her boyfriend “Freakshow” went down to Niagara a few weeks ago and while they were there they visited the Haunted House. As you can see by this photo they were suitable frightened/entertained. Tess is obviously the freeze-on-the-spot type while “Freakshow” is apparently the “book it” type (cue 1970’s Starsky & Hutch chase music). Ha bloody ha. Click on it for more mirth

So it goes

I have been a bit quiet here the past two weeks. I have been down in New Zealand helping to bury my Dad. Bugger. Here’s the last pic I have of him, taken about 3 weeks before the cancer finally finished him off. I don’t know how I feel about this yet. Mind you it was a bl**dy good funeral, about 400 odd people. He would have enjoyed it either side of the box.