Stories: Endings
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The day you left your job, or your relationship, or school. The last time you set foot in church, or smoked a joint or stopped believing in Santa Claus. It's all about farewells and endings in this month's stories …
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When I stopped believing in Santa Claus.
He was actually called Father Christmas where I came from. I was a quite smart 6 yo when, having seen the old fraud in the South Canterbury Farmers, I worked it all out. You whisper your wishes in his ear, and he later passes these on to your Mum, who hopefully would do the right thing.
I breathlessly revealed this scam to my Mum, who conceded that I could be right.
So no big presents from Father Christmas after that. Smart maybe, but not so bright...
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The day we filed for divorce was utterly surreal and I wonder sometimes what the woman behind the counter thought. There was me, obviously pregnant, my current partner holding our toddler while he chatted away amiably to my soon-to-be-ex-husband. The marriage had been over for years by the time the final decree arrived, but it still felt kind of odd. I keep the decree in the back of the wedding album next to the marriage certificate.
We've just told our eleven year old son there's no Santa Claus. He already knew and we knew he knew but he was keeping schtum for obvious reasons. (We were watching Gremlins with them and Kate was explaining about finding their father's body stuck in the chimney and then she says 'and that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus'. Oops.)
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but it still felt kind of odd
That it does... I ran into my ex on the street outside the District Court some years after the split. So I said "Hi - say, let's get divorced..." after a little thought she said "OK".
A bit like when me met. kinda.
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could also double as Bastards I Have Known:
I worked the Easter Show one year, running the stall where every player wins a prize. You had to pop a balloon or three with one of our blunt darts, and the balloons were only half full and the darts often bounced off if you actually managed to hit one. (If you've heard this before you must have been watching __The Real Hustle on Prime last Sat nite)__. And yes, the boxes of expensive stuff on the top two shelves really were empty, because you had zero chance of winning them. If you were lucky you could win a crap stuffed toy, but you were more likely to win a plastic spider which every loser recieved in order to fullfil the promise that 'every player wins a prize'. The spiders were actually defective stock supplied to the stall owner by whoever made plastic spiders - they weren't molded properly, had missing legs, head, or torso, and were probably worth 2¢.
Anyway the boss employed 16 year old truants because they were cheap and he knew they would invariably nick some money for themselves. So he'd fire them after 2-3 days because they were thieves; and put another in their place; and then fire them too when they nicked money as well. And he'd never pay them their wages either because they were theives and were bloody lucky he didn't call the Police.
After a week I realised what his M.O. was and that (even tho' I hadn't nicked any money) he'd find some reason to fire me too. So I waited until the busiest time (the Saturday night shift) and quit at 8pm. By 'quit' I mean I left him a letter saying "I quit" together with a reconciliation of the hours worked to date, and a 'reciept' for the wages I'd taken from the till. The rest of the money I left in a bag under the shelf. And since he only employed one person to work the stall during a given shift, I'd guess he lost about the same money he'd saved by firing staff and not paying them.
(BTW - we only ever saw him at the beginninng/end of a six hour shift)(I quit one hour in) -
Do all endings have a defining moment?
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The week following my own divorce (and yes, very surreal, sort of awkwardly formal, no ill will or anything) I went on a trip to the snow. While I was there I had a dream that on the bus out to the ski field we drove past a cemetery, and I noticed my grave. I realised that I'd actually been dead for the last two or three years, and of course! That was the reason that my husband left me, and why the guy I liked wasn't sufficiently interested in a long-term thing. It was a massive relief, and I knew that I could finally move on. While there's a bit of a breakdown in the analogy there, the dream was very much a turning-point for me.
The most notable thing was that on my return to Auckland, I was browsing through the obituaries in the herald, and found my own name; I'm talking first, middle & last name. Spooky! Different person, obviously.
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Do all endings have a defining moment?
Sometimes, but it often doesn't reveal itself as an ending until a some time has passed.
Any premature attempt to draw a line in the sand is usually met with fate throwing something in your face just to prove you wrong.
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Once when my contract wasn't renewed because "I didn't have enough experience for the role" (that I had been doing for nine months, I'm sure it had nothing personal to do with the fact that there were people at organisation who disliked me for no apparent reason other than stupid office politics) I changed the auto-correct in Word to change every mention of the figurehead leader of the organisation to "Smelliot". Because apparently I'm 12....
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Smelliot
Love it!
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While I don't have a story, at the mention of breakups I have an observation.
One of our standard roster of questions at job interviews goes something like "Tell us about an experience that didn't end well and how you would approach it differently in the future" etc...
Anyway, it's become noticeable that when interviewing women, we get a whole raft of replies and scenarios. When interviewing men, we usually get an admission of a bad breakup with a partner/gf etc... where there's obviously still some residual guilt or anger going on.
I'm constantly amused and surprised at the seedy stuff some guys appear happy to contribute as if it might add weight to their attractiveness for employment. As if they're going to score a pity job or something.
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My friendship with my best boyhood friend, Guy, ended when he died aged 19. His lung muscles stopped working having finally succumbed to muscular dystrophy.
We'd lost touch for the first first year I spent away from home drinking and enjoying college life to the full. Carelessness on my part.
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Oh, Don. That's a sad ending. Some are, whereas some, as Heather and Emma have said, are a little strange and awkward, and some are cataclysmic. And most always, they lead to new beginnings of some sort. The ending that's had the most impact of me has been the ending of my father's life. It was so beautiful. He was a bit scared at first, but with all of us around him talking to him, and with my brother's hand on his heart, he went quietly and beautifully. It's true what they say, you know. You can tell when their spirit has left their body. Dad went about 2 minutes before his heart stopped. Peaceful. Exhilarating. Reassuring. A good ending to a great life.
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I can't get to the Great Blend event tonight - childcare issues. So instead, here is my story of my great leap into godlessness.
Actually, it wasn't so much of a great leap as a slow drift, until the final moment when I decided I could take the Catholic church no longer. I was born and bred a Catholic, went to convent schools, and went through all the rituals - baptism, confession, first communion, confirmation, even a full-scale nuptual mass. During my university years and my early working life I drifted in and out of the church, but I was questioning it more and more. I recall that when my husband and I went on our pre-marriage course (a pre-requisite for getting married in the church), I shocked the gatekeepers by asking if my fiance and I could share a room (we were living together, after all), and then upset them later on in a group discussion by saying that there really was no moral difference between the rhythm method, or Vatican roulette, and other methods of contraception.
A few years after we married, we both threw in our jobs, and started studying again. Sadly, in my first year back at university, we found that we would be unable to have children without medical intervention. At the same time, I was studying Philosophy, and at last, under the twin compulsions of rigorous analytic thinking and infertility, I found that I could simply believe no more.
But I kept on going to church. It was a community I had belonged to all my life, and I thought that I might just find some support there.
What a silly idea. I recall sitting at mass one week, weeping, and not a single person offered me any comfort, not even the priest.
Infertility was, and maybe still is, a problem that is very little talked about in the church, except to condemn all intervention as sinful (against god's will, apparently, not that I actually believed in any god whatsoever anymore).
The weeks before Christmas, known as Advent in the christian dispensation, can be very difficult for infertile people, because in church, the entire focus is on the expected birth of a child. So I decided to do something about getting the congregation to be aware of just how bloody awful it can be to long for a child, to not be able to have a child, and to be constantly reminded of impending birth. I rang up the person who was writing the prayers of intercession that week (that's the prayers where you ask god's intervention). Just about every week, the prayers mentioned a specific group of people who were facing difficulties - the unemployed, the sick, the terminally ill - and asked god's support for them. Naming the group was a way of reminding the wider congregation that as christians, they ought to be supporting them. I thought that it would be a good idea to offer a prayer asking for support for people who weren't able to have children. Surely, I thought, the local parish could at least do that.
Not a hope. There was a specious prayer about 'bearing the burdens that god gives to us', but the word and the concept of infertility were simply not mentioned. Just too damned out there, apparently.
"Well, f..k you," I thought. And I haven't been back since. (Other people's weddings and funerals excepted.)
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And most always, they lead to new beginnings of some sort
Agree with that - when one of my closest friends died of cancer a few years back we were all on tenderhooks waiting for the 'call-up' to go and see him in the hospice to bid our farewells and make our peace.
When I got the call, our second daughter had just been born, so we took her with us, and its a lasting memory of Al smiling as he - eyes closed, shrunken, skin all waxy and colour of nicotine - woke up from a morphine slumber to say that he could hear Lily's breathing and asking that she be brought closer.
We all sat on the bed, and seeing a newborn sitting with a dying man was classic - and emotional - cycle of life ends and beginnings stuff. Still brings a lump to my throat thinking about it.
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Your friend Al from school?
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Nah, Al H (Hammy, Hamster, Rampton, Bundy) from Sydney
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Oh yeah, I think I remember.
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Jesus, it's only 9am here (Sydney), and I'm a bit of an emotional wreck having read Don and Richard's contributions - thanks, you know, in that odd I-didn't-really-want-to-have-a-cry kinda way...
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Like many men of his generation, my father wasn't very good at confronting his emotions, and I think his state of near-denial actually prolonged his terminal illness. I also made it pretty hard for me to get my head around.
Until, that is, one night when I dreamed that it was me who was dying. It was awful, inescapable and terrifying -- a feeling worse than anything I can recall. I woke up gasping at 6am.
But it was a turning point. I felt like I knew what had been going through his mind. I knew that we weren't going to have any magic moment -- it would have put pressure on him and I wasn't going to demand that -- but that was okay. I talked to him a little on his deathbed, and quite a bit more after he was brought back to the house after he passed away. We were good.
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Moving away.
I spent the best part of my childhood on Waiheke Island. Our dirt cheap 3/4 acre section was covered in fruit trees and had a waterfall and swimming hole (where I caught my first eel). We had chickens, relied on rainwater and cooked with a wood/coal burning stove. I got my first bike at seven and for the next several years had the freedom of the beaches, the bush and the sea. I earned an income from selling fruit, assembling newspapers and collecting bottles discarded by the "townies" - and spent it on comics, milkshakes and playing pool. My friends and I often trespassed on the beautiful beaches and hills owned by a toilet paper magnate, building forts and repelling fictitious invasions. We celebrated the end of disco with a bonfire. Life couldn't have been better.
Then one day we moved away. My parents tried to keep the property but eventually relinquished it after a succession of colourful tenants blew holes in the wall with a 303, advertised it as a drop in zone for hippies and got busted for stashing bags of heroin in the underground water tank. I went back a few years ago to find Waiheke crawling with 4x4s, luxury yachts and subdivisions. The place I remember, that I sometimes wish I could retreat to, has been destroyed and is no more.
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We flew out of Wellington on Anzac Day, 1991. I think it was a Thursday, and I know that the weather was crappy. Because it was a holiday more people were able to come to see us off. KateB was there, with her mother. My sisters, maybe Oma and my aunt, and my mother's 'friend' from polytech. I hadn't been on an airplane since we'd moved back from Germany, apart from a jaunt to Nelson to see Alexis, so I was concentrating on being excited about that instead of all the other crap that had been going on for the past while.
It'd been a somewhat difficult couple of months. Mum didn't want to move back to Japan, and she made sure that everyone knew that. One night we went out to dinner at Flanagan's (now Sandwiches) and she and Neil fought so extensively that all I could do was sit there and cry while my sisters tried to comfort me by talking about how we could build igloos out of the potato 'bricks' that the menu had promised. I was saying in my head then "it's alright for you, you get to stay". I wished like fuck that I was in sixth form, or my first year of university instead of being ten. I wished that I was allowed to go to boarding school instead, even though I realised that boarding school probably wouldn't be the fun and games that Enid Blyton's Saint Clare's books made it out to be. But it couldn't be worse than Raroa, the school I'd never bothered to get heavily invested in because I knew all along that I'd be leaving.
And since I was leaving, I fought with Kate more than usual, blowing up at her during a lunchtime game of The Game of Life, running off to the bathroom to cry while my friends took turns trying to comfort me. When lunchtime was over and we were sitting in a circle on the mat, one of the boys asked Mrs. Petez, my sworn enemy, why I was crying, and she started on some spiel about how everyone needed to be more sensitive. I choked at what I saw as being her total and utter hypocracy, and so I got up and ran out of the room again. I sobbed hysterically in the bathroom for a while, as you do when your world is like, totally ending, and then tiny little Frances showed up and took me on a walk around the field where the cold Wellington air blew on my hot feverish cheeks in a way that I found to be very dramatic, and I was certain that a character in a Judy Blume novel would feel the same way. When I returned to class I was asked to go and see another teacher - one that I actually liked - to talk about it, and so I sat in a spinny chair in a library resource room and tried to explain how Mrs. Petez hated me and how Kate was like, totally insensitive, or whatever it was that was making me so angry. Of course Kate and I made up and I stayed at her house the day that the movers came to pack up our boxes. My mother made sure to leave my sisters almost nothing, as her way of saying "I am angry that you are not coming too".
Of course, leaving had its benefits too. I wasn't supposed to be allowed to get my ears pierced until I was 12, but one day we were in Hataitai for some reason, buying flowerpot bread from a bakery that I think is now the Bellagio Cafe, and Mum said it would be a good idea for me to get my ears pierced then, so that they wouldn't be too sore on the plane. I got little pink sparklers, of course, and studiously cleaned and rotated the posts, but even so a lot of my hair got caught up on them and my ear swelled up later in the hotel in Japan. Leaving also meant shopping sprees, and being allowed to buy not only Tiger Eyes but also Forever, Mum evidently having chosen to forget our discussion about the grammatical mistakes in that book about how they came when they were already there, and her incredibly awkward explanation about "whitey fluids". Our flight to Auckland was all about hot stuffed crossaints since we were in business class, and I peered through the curtains at the plebs in economy with their packets of cheese and crackers and decided then and there that I never wanted to be one of them. Then we got a shuttle from our travelodge hotel into Newmarket and Mum spent up large on me. I watched The Simpsons (it may have been their first ever Halloween special) that night and talked to Karen and Anji on the phone - they already seemed so far away.
The Koru Lounge seemed really strange to me - I couldn't understand why people would need the showers there, but the idea of free food was awesome. The plane was fitted out with a camera out the front, and onscreen maps about the distance to Tokyo. We were in business class again, so there was free champagne or orange juice while we were waiting to take off. I got to go up and see the cockpit later, and there were constant deliveries of peanuts and playing cards. It was pretty much my idea of heaven. I played around with the different radio stations and watched Home Alone and Fried Green Tomatoes. The three-course lunch had Tiramisu for dessert and to this day I often think it's a Japanese thing, and for dinner there was John Dory in a champagne sauce. I'm not sure why these things are etched so firmly into my memory, but they are. I think the hard thing about being ten is that you're still a kid, but you're not really a child - especially not when you've had to leave your sisters behind. The flight attendents couldn't just give me some stickers and a colouring book. Well, maybe they could have. I probably had a stuffed toy with me, although I'm not sure which one. Maybe Chi Chi the monkey.
It was of course nighttime when we got there after the eight plus hour flight, so I couldn't see what Tokyo looked like. The Narita runway was picked out in green lights and it looked spooky. Our plane landed right after a flight from the Philipines, so customs was jammed. I'm not sure if Neil didn't know then that our red diplomatic passports could have sped us through the line, or if he just didn't want to be ostentatious about it, so we had to wait an eternity to get through. According to Mum's diary, (and yes, I read it when I was twelve. I'm not proud), I was really good the whole time, even though I was probably about dead on my feet. I think a well-timed sugar hit from leftover airplane lollies might have helped. The bus to Shinjuku from the airport took another two hours. I may have dozed a little, but my eyes were just too big gobbling up all the signs in a language I couldn't read, and Mum and Neil would have pointed out landmarks that they knew from the first time they were there.
The Keio Plaza hotel is two towers joined together at the base. The lobby was huge, and featured the biggest '80s style chandalier I'd ever seen, all square-like and sparkling. I stared at it while we checked in, Neil probably fumbling to remember his Japanese while everyone from the front desk staff down to the bell boys in their green pillbox hats probably knew enough English to see us right anyway. The tallest tower is 47 floors, the other, in which we were staying on the 28th floor was 34. Always before whenever I'd stayed in hotels, I'd been in at least an interconnecting room with my parents. This time I was in a big room with two double beds all by myself. Over the next two weeks I would come to relish that space, and feel Very Very Grown-Up in there, but that night, despite knowing that my parents were just down the hall and only a phone call away, I was terrified.
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I sobbed hysterically in the bathroom for a while, as you do when your world is like, totally ending, and then tiny little Frances showed up and took me on a walk around the field where the cold Wellington air blew on my hot feverish cheeks in a way that I found to be very dramatic, and I was certain that a character in a Judy Blume novel would feel the same way.
What a long yet wonderfully vivid sentence that is ...
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So often endings aren't clear-cut, they drag out, they blur into the beginnings of something else.
Even death, which is as final as we know how to get, is only final for someone else. For us, the death of someone else is not the end of the person, their memory lasts.
I was there when my Father-in-Law died just over seven years ago.
I was there at his home when the first doctor told him it was bronchitis, take some antibiotics and stop malingering in bed.
I was there later that day when the second doctor said, its pneumonia, I'm calling an ambulance right now.
I was there that evening when he went into the coma.
I was there in the ICU while nothing much happened apart from more machines being plugged into him.
I was there a week or so later when they turned off the life support.
I was there in the funeral home before they closed the casket.
I was there at the small but perfectly formed wake the night before the funeral.
I was there at the funeral, I was a pallbearer. I spoke with his friends and family.
I was with his widow when we picked up the bigger and heavier than expected box of his ashes.
I was there to comfort his daughter, my wife.
I was there on the first anniversary of his death, and the second, and all of them since.
I was there when my oldest son, who was less than a year old when his Poppa died, first asked about his Poppa and what he was like.
I was there when my youngest son cried because he never got to meet his Poppa.
I was there through it all, but I can't say exactly when he died. I don't know where the endings are and where the beginnings are in all that.
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Over the next two weeks I would come to relish that space, and feel Very Very Grown-Up in there, but that night, despite knowing that my parents were just down the hall and only a phone call away, I was terrified.
I don't want that to be the last sentence. Keep writing! Tell your story.
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I agree, Joanna. Tell us more. It sounds like the ten yr old got to go on some sort of odyssey even if she didn't want to. We need to know more!
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