Threads of rich lives merge at King's farewell

Caption1: TOGETHER: A private family service and cremation at Purewa followed the St Patrick's service. PICTURE / MICHAEL TUBBERTY


By JULIE MIDDLETON

There was a spine-tingling moment towards the end of the funeral of historian Michael King and his book editor wife, Maria Jungowska.

As singer Helen Medlyn soared through the hymn Ave Maria! beneath the wooden eaves of St Patrick's Cathedral, a woman in the Moriori contingent - a group whose cultural renaissance was fuelled by King's writings - launched into a spontaneous waiata.

The threads of song, one in Maori, one in Latin, floated together into the still air, crossing and looping around each other, finally hanging together in one perfect whole.

No more than 30 seconds long, the marriage of music was still enough to make you catch your breath, to send a frisson down your spine.

It seemed to symbolise the affection King gained in both Maori and Pakeha worlds.

And it perhaps encapsulated the couple's unity: devoted for 25 years, they would never be apart.

King, 58, and Maria Jungowska, 54, died a week ago at Maramarua, in a fiery road accident on their way to a Northland holiday.

King had just been told that his throat cancer was in remission.

The doleful ring of a lone bell drew several hundred mourners to the Catholic service in Auckland, which had been noted as a "private funeral service" in death notices, but appeared to have grown into quite the opposite.

In the crowd was Prime Minister Helen Clark, MP Georgina te Heu Heu, writer CK Stead, and luminaries from publishing and academic worlds.

At the front of the chilly church, two wooden coffins sat on plinths, candles flickering above them. Maria Jungowska's casket bore red and white roses and ferns, King's a bouquet of woven flax and paua shells; a picture of them together sat on a stand.

Eulogies described a couple who were devoted to each other and their families, uncomplaining in the face of their respective health dhproblems - Maria Jungowska's multiple sclerosis was worsening - and at peace living by the sea at Opoutere.

King's children, Rachael and Jonathan, told of a father still very much available even after his marriage to their mother had ended, a father who passed on a genuine love for everything New Zealand.

Only-child Maria Jungowska, said her friends, was a perfectionist who was close to her mother, June, and a staunch ally.

She had been described by her husband as "the angel at my table".

But King's "one big fear", said Rachael King, "was that he would grow old and senile. He's been saved from that - and Maria's been saved from a body that was not co-operating."

When cancer struck last year, King started making funeral plans, choosing music.

Former Shortland Street star Tandi Wright, a cousin of King's daughter-in-law, did her first public solo, singing an Irish song in a light, breathy voice. (Singer Medlyn is a friend of King's sister Louise.)

After the service, the caskets were carried from the church into a weak sun and each loaded into a light-blue hearse.

In a poignant moment, Maria Jungowska's distraught mother approached her daughter's coffin and laid her head on it.

The caskets were driven to Purewa, in Meadowbank, where a private family service was to be followed by cremation.

* A public memorial service for King and Maria Jungowska is planned at Wellington's Te Papa Tongarewa/Museum of New Zealand at noon on Saturday, April 17.