Keeping The Gate Open

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So many things broke this year. The first thing was Sharon. The worst thing was Sharon. She broke and then she died.

Other things broke too. Things that are things. The sink. The dishwasher. A car. Things that I care less about.

My mother and I used to call a good year a year in which no one died. I cannot do that now. Haven’t been able to do it for a while. She died and others have died too. Unexpected sudden deaths.

For the last few years I’ve focussed on trying to prevent deaths further afield. I’ve lost some friends over it but I figure now that they weren’t friends. Real friends support all human rights.

This death was close range. A dear younger sis-in-law. Funny term. As though the law made us sisters. But we were sisters even after my divorce from her brother, after the law unsistered us.

I loved her strength her vitality her courage. She left her mother and went to her lover, a woman, when she was twenty.That took courage then. Thirty three years of being in a loving lesbian relationship, fifty three years of life.

The reports came in and we hoped and prayed. I’m agnostic and animalistic and humanist and accepting of faiths so I prayed to the great goodness, the great goddess. One operation. Two, three operations and then we were told she was dying.

Sharon had been driving down from one rural urban city to the sacred cemetery whenua tapu outside the capital city, when a driver crossed the centre line and ploughed into her.

By some super human strength - which she always possessed-she called her wife, Alvina, and said: ‘they came straight for me.’ That driver was drunk, the passenger in their vehicle was thrown from the vehicle because they weren’t wearing a seat belt. That passenger is the sole survivor of this tragedy and their life is contaminates tragedy

My sons now grieve the second beautiful aunt they have lost in two years. Sharon was on her way to commemorate her sister, Anne, who died too young, of cancer.

Life is unfair.

Let me repeat that, life is unfair.

My three lads have grown through loss,

through the decimation of their city through natural disaster ( earthquakes). My oldest ad youngest have lost dear young friends to suicide caused by untreated depression, and my youngest lost a fourteen year old friend in a massacre by a white supremacist who hated all Muslims.

Life is unfair.

How do I rally my young adult sons when it is hard to rally hope myself?

How do I believe in the future when women wearing hijabs and abbayas are being rounded up and beaten? Beaten by fascist MAGA police in the United Stares and the Netherlands and France and Germany? When a peaceful protester raising his arms to show surrender is pummelled by police?

It is clear to me that the extremists on all sides wear the same doctrine of hate. But sometimes, oh sometimes, it is hard to find love.

How can I find the love for someone who killed a sister who was my sister in bond if not blood? How can I find the love for friends who unfriend me because I stand against the exile and extermination of people?

Well I do because I must. I believe in education. I must believe that knowledge is the gateway to freedom and that the gate must be kept open.

I believe in the fight for love. I believe that reading about the other helps me understand the other until they become a sister or a brother. I believe that open minds open hearts.

I believe I cannot shut down or cast out.

At my sister Sharon’s funeral a poem was shared - a poem she had written at secondary school after a lesson in which the class was guided to discuss values.

It was a poem she had written but never shared with her Samoan mother and her Samoan-Tokelau’an father. Her parents had let everyone in, they were immigrants themselves for immigrant is what you are called when you move to Aotearoa New Zealand from the Pacific. Note that New Zealand is in the Pacific so note the irony!

Immigrants are people whose land has been colonised and robbed of its resources. Immigrants are people fleeing persecution who seek refuge. Most of us have a thread to that history. Yes, even white people.

When we reel people into our lives we find live.

My Samoan and Tokelau’an immigrant parents sheltered and loved others, they homed and supported families. They never turned anyone away.

When I was young, lonely and when I felt like an outsider in my own country, they loved me.

That love is encapsulated in the poem about values which a teenage girl wrote to her parents long long ago

‘The essence of your life added strength to mine. Searching for a better way of life, your dreams and hopes for us have come alive. Exercising hospitality. Proceed values embedded in me.’

I believe we can continue talking to those who have gone, that we can send them love, and I believe in the miracle that they send love back to us. I cannot explain how this works but I feel it. I feel that everlasting love.

This year I will focus not on what I have lost but what I have gained. What I have gained from merging with others, what I have gained from respecting and valuing other cultures and ways of bringing that take me back to the essence.

Sharon’s funeral was a beautiful melting pot of Samoan, Palagi (European), Māori, and many other nationalities, people from all fields of work and life. She had inspired people to sing, to have fun. She had formed a choir at Police Headquarters where she worked.

The national Police Commissioner even took time out from his vacation to attend this wonderful woman’s funeral. And one of her fellows, also a policeman, wrote a poem for her, and read that poem out.

I’ve had some difficult relations with the police during protests but at that funeral I felt love towards people in a uniform I had learned to fear. I saw respect. I felt hope.

And I was welcomed by a family I never left, by the aiga, the village. I heard the waves of singing, and I felt the sadness and the power, the way song reaches up to the sky.

All the way back to every island, all the way out to every home.

I saw my sons carrying their aunt’s coffin. My dear young men.

I believe that we all return to the essence and that the essence is goodness. I believe we access goodness when we open our minds because hearts cannot open when minds are closed.

This year the values I will focus on are: Reciprocity, Respect, and Responsibility.

I believe values help heal that that which feels broken.

When we open the door of our minds we find find love. When we value the rights of all people to be respected and to be treated fairly, when we shower others in hospitality, we find the essence that is essential to well-being

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