Steve Braunias remembers Meg Hore, 1999-2019
This one is for Meg Hore, who I met once, at her family home in Christchurch on a winter's day. I was there to interview her father. Richard Hore is blind and plays the organ fantastically well. I flew to Christchurch on a Friday morning and on to Wellington that afternoon to conduct a second interview - with Shaun Johnson, who is blind and plays the piano fantastically well.
Richard and Shaun made numerous albums in the 1970s. I have their records in my collection and wanted to meet the two musicians. I was curious whether there were symmetries in their lives and expected that there weren't very many. There weren't very many. Blind, played the keyboards – that was about it. They'd led really interesting and really different lives and I liked meeting both of them very much. Shaun was sharp, witty, decisive; Richard was dreamy, emotional, fragile.
My story about the two men ran in last Saturday's Weekend Herald. It ended with a line stating that Meg had died. She was 19.
Meg was a lovely girl, bright, radiant, courageous and determined to live. Her chances weren't great when I met her. She was diagnosed in 2017 with osteosarcoma, cancer of the bone. She had chemo treatment, surgery to remove her fibula and muscle in her right leg and another operation to remove four-sevenths of her left lung. Her mother, Marilyn, said, "She has a 30 per cent chance of survival."
They were making plans for the future. "We're planning to do Disneyland next year, in Florida, for my 21st," Meg said. She died a month short of her 20th birthday. She was diagnosed with leukemia five days after I visited. She went downhill fast. I called Richard and he said, "She is dying."