An essay by Talia Marshall on the supernatural event of death
We live in a digital age where the strange paradox is that the more we share online the less people really know about us. I like to imagine that as an observer of the phenomenon I am immune to it, that I exist independently of the Age, even as I survey and participate in it. Yet I still confess far too much about my life to virtual strangers as a means of disguising what truly scares me. When I woke up to the news that Sinéad O'Connor had died, I sobbed. In my defence, this is the only celebrity death that has affected me like this. I posted about Sinéad on Facebook and the website formerly known as Twitter. I tried to post about Sinéad on Instagram but the screenshot was the wrong size and shape, and really it was all about me, so I gave up.
I listened to 'Troy' though, LOUD, as loudly as the lesbians of Wellington used to listen to it during the eighties, insisting she was one of them and conveniently blanking her pregnancy. 'Troy' is not a love song, it has the feel of anguished romance, but in the documentary of her life Sinéad revealed the phoenix and the flames were for her mother. The mother who banished her daughter from the house into the Dublin dark.
I used her name in my post and over the next few days my device fed me back image after image of Sinéad O'Connor’s angelic bald head. Before this, Facebook had decided I wanted to see pictures of Shakira and Sharon Tate which was an algorithmic mystery to me. My reaction to being saturated by images of Sinéad was: Ugh, enough already. I briefly gave into the conceit that the distaste I felt was on her behalf, because I wonder what she would have made of the grief mania, if she would have been as into it as Princess Diana, but even Sinéad wrote songs about lying on graves.
The truth is that after five days I was tired of the news Sinéad O'Connor is dead. I was exhausted by the tributes. Apparently, I am even more of an arsehole than Morrissey. And given the fact Sinéad O'Connor was so candid about her struggles – including the recent and excruciating loss of her son – the media coverage felt pre-packaged and inevitable. For the people who knew and loved her, or witnessed her miraculous being in the flesh, it will be nothing like this, nor will her death be something they will ever get over. There is no out for her surviving children, only through.
I have been struggling to write for a year. Normally, writing is the only activity that I don’t wrestle with – apart from cooking from scratch. But I’ve realised something repulsive about myself: I am good at writing about death. Nothing is sacred to me, tapu and noa merge like a body bag’s zip because I didn’t learn the right tikanga at a kuia or tohunga’s knee. I missed their received wisdom which divides the world into what can and cannot be touched. Instead I become lyrical about maggots. The rush of feeling attendant to a tragedy warms my inner reptile’s blood and words begin flicking from my tongue with too much ease.
My Māori father’s tangi was not fun, he died far too young, at 59, and our relationship was complicated. But as I sat there in the whare crying with the other mourners another part of me was already deciding what I would write about it. After Dunedin poet Rob Allan died I wrote about him, and we’d barely met, worse, I did not even remember meeting him. When I lost my young friend Angus to whakamomori last year I wrote about our pre-existing pact to not do that. Ever. It took me six months to publish the ‘essay’, out of respect for their whānau, but I started writing about Angus in my head almost as soon as it happened and felt monstrous for doing so. I also felt like a cheat because briefly, it made me feel better. It helped me to cry.
If I confessed this to a writer friend, they would probably argue that writing is how we metabolise grief, and that in doing so, and by sharing it, we convey what civilians struggle to articulate. If people want to express the gravity of a situation or feeling they will say they have no words for it, when really the opposite is true, there are far too many words; which also makes them cheap. And it is foolish to test fate, to feel any kind of writerly power over death when it always wins.
It is death which makes life so precious, we would be bored and complaisant without it. Life would be like the Talking Heads song where David Byrne opines that heaven is a place where nothing ever really happens. And it is life I want to write about, and the living, but my grief is the grand obstacle. Even though I can feel like a conjurer when I am writing, like there is no world except the one I am blurring into fact and fiction; there is nothing I can write which will ever bring Angus back. There is also nothing I can do, no button on life’s remote I can press to rewind time and make things right, and combined, these two facts have profoundly fucked me up.
Three months after Angus died, another Gemini, Mum’s brother, Martin, was found dead in his humble, immaculate, nicotine-stained, South Dunedin flat. It was Nana, Mum and her partner who did the finding. He had been dead for a few days, not weeks, and there is some tiny consolation in this. Martin was solitary, but he was still part of a family. I drove to Dunedin from the West Coast for my uncle’s burial, admiring the shaggy rimu and other podocarps, wishing I had been able to stay in Karamea – it has the best ham, cheese and pineapple toasted sandwiches in the world. After the burial and family meal at the Waterloo Hotel was over with – where my pork roast was very good although the potatoes were slightly hard – I drove home and went into the front bedroom. I closed the peacock blue light-blocking curtains and slumped into bed. And since then I haven’t really got out of bed.
I emailed my publisher about my personal curse and put my manuscript, which was due for publication, on hold. Earlier in March, to meet my deadline, I had written 50,000 words in a joyous frenzy, listening to Fleetwood Mac, but especially Stevie. Now my kupu felt malignant. Perhaps curses are the only area of the Aotearoa publishing scene where Māori are privileged and can refer to themselves as a princess with a straightish face.
A month ago, my son made me change rooms, because he said the lack of light was bad for the aged dog, who has been keeping my feet warm since September. My son also walks him because I can’t move except for going to my small tutoring job. I might be morbid but I’m a massive fan of the sun, the closed curtains were to keep the tourists out. I live on the world’s steepest street and every time I went to let some light in there was a tourist taking a photo of the house and my naked tubby bits poking through my dressing gown. Perversely, sunny days are the worst for tourists.
Usually, I love being in bed, I do my best work from here, but this was different. I could have moved to the back room where it is private and the morning light takes its time to track across the house, but I was immobilised. I guess it is Depression, but I like to think my problems are bigger than that. I like to think my problems are special. I reminded myself that Susanna Clark didn’t get out of bed, at all, after her great love and friend Townes Van Zandt died. Guy Clark, her husband, accepted this situation, until her death. I am envious because Guy and Townes were handsome and talented. All of them were in love, they were a mutual admiration trio and I have no one. Although part of my new condition is that I don’t want anyone, I just want to be able to write again without hating myself.
Tracey Emin has already immortalised not being able to get out of bed. Her 1998 installation “My Bed” showed the state of it after a four-day alcoholic suicidal depression. It sold at Christies in 2014 for £2,546,500. Four days is fuck all! Tracey Emin has nothing on me! She has no stamina. I have ruined two rooms with my catatonic misery, and it has taken 10 months. The world is my oyster and the shell is my ashtray!
The other day the dog jumped off the bed and because he has adapted to the fact I don’t move he pissed on the empty RTD box. He managed to piss mostly in the box and not on the carpet. I watched him do this and told myself it is okay that it has got this bad because I am a writer who has a book coming out in February – if I start replying to my editor’s emails. Then I listened to another true crime podcast told by people with soothing voices and did not write anything. So, I had to find another justification for why I am like this, why Marjorie the Trash Heap, the Fraggle Rock icon, is the celebrity I resemble the most.
I’m not even a hoarder, that would take too much energy. All my ancestors, Māori and Pākehā, were neat freaks, and I would not blame them for abandoning me for bringing shame to the family as I attempt to tell their story and align myself with their greatness. It took me a while to find a reason for wHy I Am LiiiKe tHis?? But I got there.
I shared my epiphany with my Lakota therapist. Over Zoom, with just darkened audio, I announced that my non-living conditions were keeping me alive, as not only would I not want anyone dealing with my body, I would not want them to have to deal with my um, grief installation. My therapist receives funding from the government to agree with me. She paraphrases my pain and tells me I have stunning insights. She says because of one horror after another my executive function has shut down. I like to imagine this like my brain cells are refusing to attend a board meeting. Inside my greying jelly chamber, there is a polished boardroom at the top of a glassy tower. A leather chair sits at the head of the never-ending table and the chair is waiting for my errant brain cells to swivel around and around in it and resume semi-normal transmission.
My therapist says she is amazed that I am able to cope at all after what I have been through [redacted] and [redacted] when I know I am just very slow to come up with practical solutions. Even when I am happy it can take me a year to change a lightbulb. After I spoke with her I realised something quite frightening, I knew it was terrifying because the solution made perfect sense and I am unhinged. Two whero flags waving in crazy winds. I realised I could just set fire to the house. By accident. With a drugged-out me in it. All I had to do was complete these actions in the correct order and it would all be over. Then there would be no shame and no mess when maybe it is my whakamā and my antipathy to being touched by anyone, especially strangers, that is keeping me here. Really, it is my son. And the dog. There is no need to dob me in to Oranga Tamariki or the SPCA. My son is 23, and the dog is almost 16. The kurī is retired.
Also, I’m pretty sure death is not the end, and I would be stuck looking down at the charred remains of my grief installation forever. I have big plans for the next life. I could become a mare so sleek she appears holographic, or even better, a lioness…but my atua are punitive ones waiting for me to at least wipe the bench before they are willing to negotiate any kind of reward system pertaining to my future incarnation; and may even evoke the cockroach clause.
I realised then it was time to ask for the worst thing: Help. I hate asking for help and I hate helpers so this was vexing. Help is one of those words where the more I look at it the less it starts to look like a word. I talked to my GP over the phone. We have never met and he prescribed me everything, including some drugs that can make you a bit high so this was a bonus. I am making light of the fact I wake up every day with my hands balled into fists, seized with terror, because fight and flight have become as fused together for me as tapu and noa and the zip is jammed.
The other day I had to get to the chemist for help before it closed. My petrol tank is permanently on empty, and I have form when it comes to running out of gas. It has happened before at the busy intersection down the road but I still decided to test the gauge like the E stands for everlasting. This time, I ran out of petrol just after the intersection and managed to park with the back end of the car nudging into the cyclist’s lane. I dug the red petrol can out of the boot and ran to the petrol station, straight into the psychopathic Dunedin southerly which was a shock to my bed-loving heart.
Usually, I have to put the dog in his cage if I leave him in the car because its electrics are dicky and if he looks out the window to see where I have gone he manages to press the down button and then he gaps it into the breach to search for a better owner. As I was running I was thinking you have probably just killed the dog Talia, because it was rush hour and I am to blame for everything, even before it happens.
As I got petrol all over myself instead of in the can, a young woman came up from behind. She asked if I needed some help. The way she was dressed reminded me very much of Angus, so I said yes. When we got to her hatchback there were drawings scattered all over the back seat and the footwell of the passenger side was chocka with stuff so I had to put the can on my lap. I asked her if she was a smoker and she said she was so I advised her not to smoke in the car for a while. I wound down the window so we didn’t get too high and asked her if she was at art school. She is, and said she had just come from life drawing class. Ah, life. The very thing I keep avoiding. She told me she’d approached me because she has been in the same situation, and my clothes were so colourful, which made me seem safe. But the truth is I wear bright colours because I suspect like all clowns, my soul is very black.
When we got back to the car the dog was alive and I thanked her and told her she was an angel. I felt certain I would meet her again, not just because it’s Dunedin, but because of Angus, and I got to the chemist in time.
Death is a supernatural event. Or rather, it is so natural we infest it with signs to make sense of it. Everything and anything is a tohu from the dead, they hang around trying to make us feel better from their better place. At Martin’s graveside my Mormon Nana was in a wheelchair and quoted the scripture about there being many mansions in her father’s house. I could feel the atheists in the family bristle and stay quiet for the woman who had lost her son. The ultimate incorrect order of things. But then so is keeping your eyes open during a prayer.
I always close my eyes during Nana’s prayers, out of fear, but from behind closed lids, I can sense who in the whānau are repeat offenders. This time there was no snickering, no funny faces. Months after my grandfather died, Nana went to bless the food and it was Martin who said, blunt and brave, “We won’t be bothering with any of that now, will we?”.
The night before Martin’s burial, I was watching YouTube and randomly clicked on Bette Midler’s version of “Delta Dawn”. Later, I realised that Nana’s breathy words were double freighted with coincidence for me because its lyrics refer to the mansions in the sky. I was very into Bette Midler when I was five but now she is just one of the many annoying celebrities on the website formerly known as Twitter. When she dies, people will likely be very upset. And it will irritate me. When Dolly Parton dies the internet will break and never recover.
Martin went into the same hole as my grandfather as ashes inside a little box. Just before Easter, 2012, I drove Martin to his father’s fresh grave, keen for a tohu, so I turned on the radio. “One” by U2 came on and I felt vindicated by the grief gods. It has become fashionable to despise U2 but the lyrics to “One” are tremendous, with Bono crooning about lepers, temples, and love. Martin said, “Can you turn that off Talia”, as like Mum he was afflicted with good taste in music. It occurs to me now that his was the tika response, and more respectful to the man we both loved than my spiritual desperation. Maybe Martin was going through something there are no words for, but silence does me in.
Right before he died, Martin got up to do the dishes. He kept a tidy whare, inside one of the many semi-detached mansions of South Dunedin. Martin must have been crook because an unwashed pile had accumulated in the sink. Old radios my uncle had turned into art and small worlds lined the walls. I’m not sure if he still collected McDonald’s toys. I had not seen Martin since Christmas or been to his flat for over a year when I had picked him up to help me shift into my new whare. Martin often helped me move house and could drink a pack of good plunger coffee dry as payment. His spoon was louder than an orchestra as he stirred in the sugar. My uncle probably agrees with the all the kuia in the sky and bubbling up from the whenua who say it is time to wipe the bench, and let the dog out for a piss.
Mum said the strangers who came to take her brother, Martin, away, let Nana sit for hours with the body of her son. They stood, patient as the walls, so Nana’s deft, warm, dry, retired matron’s hands could stroke Marty and just be his mum again.
This is the grace and vocational duty to the living and the dead that I aspire to, but it is a tricky dance, asking for their permission. This is the quietness of civilians I am trying to find the right words for, the way water wants to find a way ... this wai we are made of, carrying us through and for each other ... this awa ... this aroha ... this wai, all ordinary and holy, yes, this is why I am writing again. The author wishes to advise that Iona Winter ((Kāi Tahu/Waitaha), who lost her son three years ago to whakamomori, is raising money for a grief almanac.
Where to get help
1737, Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor
Lifeline – 0800 543 354 or (09) 5222 999 within Auckland
Youthline – 0800 376 633, free text 234 or email talk@youthline.co.nz or online chat
Samaritans – 0800 726 666
Suicide Crisis Helpline – 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)
What's Up – 0800 942 8787 (for 5–19-year-olds). Phone and online chat counselling is available seven days a week from 11am-11pm.
thelowdown.co.nz – or email team@thelowdown.co.nz or free text 5626
Anxiety New Zealand - 0800 ANXIETY (0800 269 4389)
Rural Support Trust - 0800 787 254 (0800 RURAL HELP)
Supporting Families in Mental Illness - 0800 732 825
