still more tears.

Early this morning Pete passed away. Pete is Dad's cousin Alison's husband, and I've known him as an uncle all my life. He realised he was unwell recently and when it was confirmed they found out he didn't have much time. I had a chance to spend a sunny but brisk Saturday morning at the Hutt hospital before moving to Toronto not long after he was diagnosed.

I've thought quite a bit about Pete since I moved here because I knew I wouldn't see him again in this world. I remember the party at their place when Megan and I were little and Ali convinced us that Pete was actually deaf and when she called his name she also stamped her foot and he could tell she needed him because he could feel the vibrations through the floorboards. I remember the many times (dressed in tino rangatiratanga t-shirts some days, work clothes some days, or most recently in long black skirt, raukura and piupiu to welcome Hillary C to NZ) he has met me at reception at Parliament where he worked in Security. Most of all I remember his gentleness - despite being tall and strong and all that jazz, he was gentle and always thoughtfully deeply kind. The time I spoke to him before I went to see him in hospital was when he called up the night before I went to Sydney in early July and he wanted to wish me a good trip.

Mum rang me today to let me know; Ali and Pete live in the Hutt valley too, so Mum rang when she and Dad got back from spending time with him this morning.

When Mum rang, I was reading a part of a novel by my favourite writer in the whole wide world, Patricia Grace. I'm writing a chapter for a book and in one part I'm referring to something that happens in Cousins, when a character goes to her home marae for the first time since she was a child. She is accompanying her cousin home who passed away in the city, and at the point in the process where the group stops to mourn for the person they are bringing on, she realises that she has an opportunity to grieve for the unfairness but also the depth of it all.

Pete and Ali, this one's for you.

"In the middle of the big lawn we all stopped. Pahe and Josie started to weep with high sounds and tears were running down their faces. The people waiting began to cry more loudly. Something was happening to me. Something.
My eyes were filling with water. Water was running from my eyes. Streams of water. Water was running from my nose and dropping onto the ground, streams of water. I had never cried before in all my life and now I felt that it would never stop. We all wept for a long time there. All my tears were falling and I was just letting them run. I had never cried before. Years of tears. And I heard the sounds coming out of me, the crying sounds, just like the sounds of the women around me.
Gradually our crying lessened and we began moving forward again."

No reira e Matua moe mai koe i roto i te Ariki...