Her ashes in New Zealand, her ashes in South Africa

A South African tourist, Tayla Storm, died in New Zealand after a lengthy battle with a rare infection. The tragedy for her and her family will be felt for many years to come. The clumsy cliché of the previous sentence reminds me of how words simply get in the way of expressing how we feel. Whenever someone close to me has a similar tragedy, I feel just as awkward, as perhaps do you. Having lost my father and sister (and my mother her husband and only daughter) when I was roughly 18, I have learned compassion, hopefully, but remain awkward in the face of others’ loss. What saddened me further about the entire tragedy for Tayla and her family is that I wouldn’t have noticed the news much if she was not a South African. If she had been, say, an American, I would have read it but with (here I struggle to find the right words) no sense of connection.

So why do I even bother responding to another death, the death of a stranger, a death among the countless that occur every day, when physical death is the common lot of us all? Because she is a South African. Again, those words are inadequate, in a sense callous, as she, all of us, are far more than natives of a homeland. Much more. And simultaneously those words state she and I share a common spirit. I would have equally felt callous, indifferent, if I had not responded to that question: why bother responding to her death? The writer’s curse is to write. The writer’s blessing is to write.

In a novel I am working on, as per usual I let my characters do what they will. Doing this brings them “to life”, lets them go much deeper than the chit-chat or blather of daily consciousness into what it truly means to be alive, and that there would be nothing to celebrate if there was no death. One of my characters, an old black Mozambican and Cederberg park warden, Benoni, is regarded by many as disturbed, as he is healthily in touch with his ancestors and his dead children, the latter victims of apartheid, we glean. They guide him. In a strange way he is becoming a moral beam of conscience for the two white SA characters, Tom and Richard, who have a lot of baggage to deal with, including the fact that Richard thought he had killed Tom when he was a youngster and now the two meet up in the Cederberg, about thirty years later, not knowing each other. Yet. But why the hell are you this “weird” person, Benoni? I used to ask him. Wrong question. It’s judgmental. It comes from the wrong side of the brain. The question stifles creativity, discovery, the process of making things new, astonishing, and perhaps closer to what they originally were. My question assumes that it can be answered in the selfsame framework of consciousness the question is posited in, in which many of us are habituated and stifled. The same can be said for my questions about the death of a stranger, Tayla Storm. They are useless, get in the way.

Writing is negotiating with the dead. To risk reduction, Benoni, in Jungian terms, is an archetype, arguably the shadow, one that was around long, long before “I” came along. One of the best books I have ever read on the ontology of a writer is Margaret Atwood’s Negotiations with the Dead. It is not a macabre notion. Take the Dia de los Muertos (Days of the Dead) celebrations, for example.

I may still not have bothered to respond to the death of Tayla Storm. But the ritual to be undertaken with her ashes is most moving. Half will stay here in New Zealand, a country she had come to love whilst on holiday. The other half will go to South Africa. Now that tolls an ancient bell, the symbolism of the act ringing far deeper than the blather of words. Cheap words: words like that tasteless one, jingoism, come to mind.

A friend of mine many years ago committed suicide. The tragedy would not stop ringing in me until I negotiated my peace with him, with myself, in a poem that took a long time before I could even put pen to paper. In closing, here it is. His name has been changed out of respect for his family.

To Ben — A Letter

Ben, in dreams you return to greet me.
The dank hand cools my wrist as we shake.
Aptly, you wear a black, academic gown
As you did in our student days. “Ahem,”
You might enquire, “Have you re-read
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire lately?”
Questions like these are shyly spoken,
Your lips trying for the edge of a smile.
You knew these questions were bizarre
In normal chat, but you had nothing else to offer.

God, that academic grail of yours.
The hellish thirst for more and more knowledge.
Your face, glazed and elsewhere,
Heady in the treadmilled need to know;
To process the relevance of hermeneutics
In readings of Gibbon, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton.
To be able to read, like a newspaper,
The Medieval Latin text of Lamentations.
Through such siftings, your gradual conversion
To Catholicism, dripping water thoughtfully
Filling a cave. You never knew the cave,
Defined by hollowness, would remain.

Ben, words have no underpinning.
They betray the much-needed mastery
Of our inner, silent desert. There,
Once the horror of our emptiness
Is uncovered, your God whispers
To his bride, the heart, we hope.
Imagine you in that room, gas stove left on,
Sleeping face congealing, slowly
Learning to stare into the untouchable.

Photographs of you have changed.
Once they were listless, unbreathed on.
Your posed face always gazed elsewhere, longing.
But now the pain is certain. Blackness
Fills your eyes, then mine, as I wince from them
With eyes closed, remembering
And trying to understand what it is I now see.
But under my lids, behind the endless thinking,
Gushes the unstoppable, life without ceasing.
Which is why I have to write,
And write these things to you.

Most of us, on hearing the news of your death,
Were silent a moment. Then, like hands
Briskly washed after a delicate task, we got on
With dinner, tennis, the new patio.
But somewhere we must grieve.
Try to learn to grieve.
Which is a kind of mourning.
Let us choose the garden, shadowed
Beneath a cathedral. May there be
Red wine, two glasses and bread.
Our shadows greet each other.
Go well.