Frank Greenall: Memories live on after death

Frank Greenall

A DEAR friend passed just a few days ago. Passed on, passed away, passed over, whatever. There are plenty who say such euphemisms of the "passed" variety are just that -- euphemistic weasel words. Why not just be up front and say "died", for goodness' sake?

Well, I think there's a good reason to use those or similar expressions if you so choose. While no one denies that the last breath has been drawn, that realistically it's a pretty good bet you're not going to be getting a call from the deceased to meet up for a flat white at the local cafe any time soon, there's also a sense that such people still ain't too far away. That, irrespective of the corporeal state of their existence, there's no way that they've shipped anchor never to be physically manifested again in any way, shape or form.

A term like "passed" implicitly acknowledges the perviousness of the membrane between the supposed living and the supposed dead. Not in the sense of spectral visitations from the grave, but in the manner in which you continue to carry bits of the essence of their being and character that still has the power to influence and shape your own actions. It's stuff that's been personally vouchsafed to you by someone's who's passed by.

In that sense, they're still very much alive and kicking -- an ongoing touchstone at times when you need another perspective, another sounding board, or even general assurance and support. While many dismiss this sort of stuff as just so much head games poppycock, I say it's as real and alive and purposeful to the degree you acknowledge it as so.

The uncontested perspective, though, that the close-up reality of someone near and dear moving on inevitably induces, is the sharpening of the priorities.

When it comes time to deal with the mundanities of the chattels, the clothes, the books, tools and appliances, all the general bits and pieces that accumulate around a lived life, it certainly affirms the verity of he tangata, he tangata, he tangata -- the people, the people, the people, is what it's all about, Alfie. No matter the price paid for the various ornaments, adornments and oddments, it always looks a tawdry pile indeed compared to the intrinsic value of the actual person around whom it accumulated.

Kim Hill recently interviewed Daisy Goodwin, the writer behind the current TV dramatisation of the life of Queen Victoria. In the interview, Daisy mentioned that, while away from home working on the original treatment, she got a call from her local supermarket. It was to say they were unable to deliver her groceries because her street was closed off by a fire emergency. Turned out the house going up in flames was her own family home. She lost everything, including all her memorabilia, and at the time was devastated.

Some months down the track, though, a funny thing happened. As the rebuilt house neared completion, Daisy said that she started to feel quite grateful that she had -- as it were -- a clean slate to work from, without all the physical baggage from pre-fire days. In fact, she continued, not too long after the fire, she even had trouble remembering what was actually in all those piles of personal effects, papers and general "irreplaceable" memorabilia. But the one thing that didn't burn, as she pointed out, was the living memories in her own head.

The term "Victorian" has come to mean staid and dutiful, but the little Queen had Dash (the name of her beloved King Charles spaniel) in more ways than one. As she confessed in letters to her daughter Vicky later, she went to the wedding altar no longer virginally chaste, having previously consorted with the true first love of her life, Lord John Elphinstone.

In the fleeting journey of our arbitrarily allotted span, it's encouraging to be reminded that the Queen who came to symbolise the dutiful still managed to gather rosebuds while she could -- both before the shackles of office dimmed her dash, and later in widowhood via a final highland fling with ghillie Brown.