I read a poignant email in which a person describes hearing the voices of loved ones who have died. Sitting in a boring meeting, he says, he sometimes hears them making jokes and commenting on the proceedings.
At the Far North urupā, helping to tidy their grave, I conjure up the voices of my parents-in-law. George and Audrey retained their working-class Mancunian accents even though they arrived in New Zealand young. They grew so close to the local Māori community that George was honoured with a tangi and a place in the urupā. Audrey eventually followed him to the beautiful site on the hill above Doubtless Bay.
Now, the land has dried out and the evenings are long and full of golden light, and the tūī are in their phase of the long dirge call that starts at 4am. Those dreary, repetitive notes sound like madness at dawn, and in the evening turn into a lament of melancholy and regret tinged with something fierce: expectation. The new year is coming. 2025 promises a wild ride: the climate, the politics, the geopolitical instability. We need to brace for it.
America, stricken with brain rot, in the grip of infantilism, has elected a cartoon character as president. The cartoon is appointing TV personalities and cranks to run the free world. It’s so alarming I institute a news blackout and spend time on the maunga, consulting the tūī, conjuring up lost voices.
For decades, we’ve done Christmas dinner at my house. Miraculously, it’s never fallen apart: no shouting, no fist-fighting, no degeneration into tears.
Every year, the extended family has gamely donned the festive hats and festively pulled it off. Often it’s been a great success. Once, not so long ago, it ended in exuberant dancing. The whānau: nothing is so important. I can hear their voices, every single one of them.
There were always last-minute logistics with my brother (would he make it?) before he and his family arrived. Every year, my husband bought him a fancy cigar for after dinner. My parents would arrive; my sister and family would show up, jetlagged, complaining about the Christmas rain.
The cousins have always occupied one end of the long table, adding boyfriends and girlfriends until they outnumbered the elders. One year, there was a long argument at the kids’ end about the societal implications of actress Salma Hayek’s pants. My father rapped out some ferocious rebuke and was told, witheringly, by one kid’s girlfriend, “Oh, well done, you.”
Recalling the small, potent figure of my mother, I think of Lili Anolik’s amusing description of writer Joan Didion in her book, Didion and Babitz. Didion disguising ruthlessness by emphasising her frailty: “She cops to it quite often, but you’ll miss it, because it’s the tininess, it’s the sunglasses, it’s the shyness. But she’s a killer.”
My mother’s sardonic wit, her dark laughter. Her tininess, her sunglasses, her shyness. And her voice: I can hear it, just as I can hear my brother’s, as it veered from cautious to immoderately hilarious to grand.
There were similarities in their voices: an occasional histrionic or melodramatic note, a rhetorical tone. But he had no ruthless quality; he was no killer. He was sensitive, all raw nerves. He always looked to me like the boy who couldn’t grow a shell hard enough to cover his lack of toughness.
My mother died not knowing that 10 months later, in May 2024, my brother would also be gone. Now, there are only the photos and writings and relics, and their ghost voices that live on in our heads and must not, will not, leave us.
