The teeth of Te Whiro

I am quite numb, after two funerals in two weeks.  Coincidentally, both were at the same church.  In the shadow of these experiences, my thinking is quite jumbled.  No doubt these paragraphs will reflect some of this.

The first funeral was of a former high school teacher of mine, with whom I had reconnected on Facebook.  He had been suffering from motor neurone disease.  Arriving at the venue brought the feeling of entering a time machine, albeit one that wasn’t working properly.  Almost all of the teachers whom I remember from my high school years were there, and all of them of course twenty years older.  The greater part of ageing has perhaps been borne by me, since I was not recognisable to them.

When someone has died who is elderly, a funeral necessarily condenses their life in order to acknowledge and celebrate it, and when the dead are young, we mourn what might have been, the loss of our hope in them.  The commemoration of a person in middle age combines both of these elements.  It made for a long service, as person after person from a life lived very fully gave up the accumulated, myriad details of their time together.  Each of the bereaved seemed to be pressing their own imprint against the passing of commemorative time, the moment when all this would necessarily be done and the casket put back the hearse.

So much of the ambience at a funeral is determined by the choice of music.  This was one area in which my teacher had not let his wishes be known, and the family had made their own choices as a result.  There was Michael Jackson singing “Gone Too Soon” as the casket was brought in.  Something, I think, might be lost in the expression of people’s literal emotions.  What was evoked by the later singing of “Wind Beneath My Wings”, I was less certain.  There is too much noise for me around widely-loved popular songs to make an emotional connection.  The fault was mine.

The dead man’s children are the age now that I was as his pupil, and I the age of him when he taught me.  I was one of the keenest history students at my small school and spent time on extension projects, additional reading — the works — so we had a lot of time together.  It was also at that time that my mental health began to disintegrate significantly.  My memories of that time are of emotions disproportionate to the content we were studying (even allowing for teenage enthusiasm), of almost everything being what is now described as “triggering”.  I was in a state of post-traumatic stress without a trauma.  That teacher was one of the first people to suggest I take my foot off the accelerator, that I was doing fine, that I didn’t have to fight for every point as if I were the least able of students.  By the time that advice came I was too far gone to heed it, but it was good advice.  He was, in that sense and others, a bon vivant, and he met by all accounts a bad death with the kind of courage no-one wants to have to draw upon.

I am not well fit for funeral theology, especially of the evangelical kind.  The celebrant’s rhetorical questioning of whether God had purposed that my teacher die this way drew sobs from the congregation and bile in my own throat, even as the answer was “no”.  I remembered the origins of my atheism in sermons of this nature.  Those earlier days of depression were bilious too.

Not long after this I heard from hungrymama the news that her sister-in-(common)-law had died.  Juliet I first met in the secondary schools orchestra.  She was one of the Burnside violists, a clutch of talented young women, most of whom were playing Tom Warren violas, the most desired of the New Zealand luthier-made instruments.  She was kind to me despite my novice status on the same instrument and my lack of confidence.  Later, she fostered me through the early days of the local youth orchestra, keeping me steady on the notion that this was no big deal, that we practised hard and were entitled to be there (the notion I continually doubted).  She was wry and whimsical and the kind of person whom everybody liked.  She had a soft voice and made lightly-pointed remarks.  In her company I felt like my mental health problems were no big deal, and despite the fact that I dropped out of the orchestra for a year or so because of them, we stayed in touch and took university classes together.

We didn’t know it then, but her own depression that came on a couple of years later, was going to dwarf any earlier experiences.  I have been thinking about it a lot this week, trying to reread my memories of us at nineteen or twenty, trying to see from an older perspective what was going on.  The best analogy I can give is of Te Whiro, who haunts Baxter in at least one of the sonnets of the Autumn Testament, and elsewhere.

… The hard rind of the ego
Won’t ever crack, except to the teeth of Te Whiro,

That thin man who’ll eat the stars.  I can’t say
It pleases me.  (42, 7-10)

It was a force primarily centripetal, with the aim of destroying her, and it had a mighty backdraft too.  I was too much in the company of Freudian notions of mental health to understand then that there are mental illnesses of all kinds that have no traumatic event and perhaps no trigger at their core.  They simply consume; they are, in this regard, evil.  My friend still existed, of course, but was often overwhelmed by this otherness.  I did not know what to do, and after a few years of my anxious, irregular, Penfold-like hovering on the margins of the dreadful unhappiness that was not her fault, we saw less of each other.  She felt, at the time, that I had let her down, and indeed I had.

I heard through friends and family of her recovery, of her overcoming the physical as well as mental limitations that her illness had brought, her subsequent graduation, and professional success, and saw on Facebook the lovely photos of her with her partner and their animals.  What pleasure, what hopefulness, to see Te Whiro withstood, to see the exemplary staring back of someone whose life had been so perilous not long before.  She had perhaps a dozen years of good health before it came back so recently, and she made in the dark of this the choices that took her life.  I regret this, but I accept it.  I think there are some things which cannot be withstood, even by people who are otherwise strong and brave.  Mental illness is one area in which experience can make things worse as easily as it can make it better.  In its severest forms, it erodes exactly that which preserves the will to live: the illogical optimism of the psyche.

Our thirties are inevitably the product of our twenties, of the choices we make, the experiences we have, of random chance and the inheritance of our genes.  I am glad my friend got to have some of the things of which we thought her illness would rob her over a decade ago, those middle-class talismans of higher education and travel, as well as those more widely-shared dreams of love and animals.  I abhor the way that mental illness eats away our ability to feel that we are loved, that we are worthy of love, our hope in our own existence.  I do not believe that what Te Whiro takes, he keeps, however.  In memory, in narrative, in the refusal to give up hope, we take back to ourselves the people we lose even though we loved them.  I would have wished for both these people-from-my-past so many more years.  I wish these years, with mental and physical health, for you and the people you love.

Image via hungrymama.

Tagged as: death, funerals, mental illness, Te Whiro