Practical love

Tom had a curious brain and clever hands. He was a practical guy. He knew how to fix things, from bikes to computers to relationships.

When we got the news we were in Napier, on the first morning of our summer holiday. With little to say, we got dressed and gathered our things from around the thin-walled motel unit. We packed up the car, turned it around.

I’d been holding it together pretty good, working out what arrangements now needed to be quickly made or quickly cancelled. But when it was my turn to drive I found myself sobbing with clumsy sounds, one hand on the wheel, and wiping at my dripping eyes and nose with the other, like a little kid.

I was remembering things – things I didn’t stop to treasure enough at the time. Like when Tom helped us buy our first car. It was stressful. We were clueless, and pregnant. We had very little money, even less sense. There were a hundred reasons to judge us. Tom didn’t. He looked over the red Corona, knew what things to check and what things to ask.

That morning was the 23rd. Tom was a practical guy. His departure two days before Christmas, when there were all sorts of tasks to be done in preparation for the day, seemed impractical. And that was not like him at all.

We got a place aboard the earliest ferry the next day, set out at 4.30am. I was exhausted – by 2018, from crying – and I slept on the ferry floor. Christmas Eve holidaymakers stepped around me. The drive was hot, felt airless in a hastily over-packed car. It took 12 hours to get to Dunedin.

All the family were there.

Christmas plans had been quietly abandoned. The heat of the day, unsubdued at 8pm; the forlorn decorations; shock and pain so monumental it knocks the breath out of you, disorientates you, makes you helpless. I didn’t know what to say or do. I offered words when I could think of them, gave hugs when I couldn’t, folded washing.

Tom was a practical guy. Don’t get me wrong: he was a bunch of other things too. He was a wide reader and deep thinker, immersed himself in any topic you wanted to discuss - loved jokes so appalling they were not safe for work, but were nonetheless cracked out at his funeral, to the laughter and tears of a crowd so big people stood all around the walls.

He had talked to me about my thesis in the long years of writing. The last time I saw him was the day I graduated with my doctorate. The whole family went out for dinner afterwards and he and I talked, with the sleeves of my gown brushing over pizzas and handles of beer. I can’t remember what we talked about. I wish I could remember what we talked about. I knew he was proud of me.

But Tom was a practical guy, and his love was often expressed in practical ways. You can ask ‘his girls’, the people he loved most and took the greatest pride in, his wife and two daughters. You can look at the house he built them, the garden he raised for them, the work of his heart and his hands.

His departure two days before Christmas, that was perhaps not as impractical as it had seemed. In the hours that followed, the Christmas plans quietly abandoned were quietly revived.

Practical hands pitched in, made late minute supermarket runs, pulled together an impromptu Christmas feast. For a short time, exhaustion was put on ice, alongside the drinks. The work of our hands – chopping, serving, gathering dishes – pressed pause on the injury to our hearts. Some laid out the kai, some kept an eye on the kids, all were quietly thankful.

Because almost everyone was there for the first time: the siblings and the aunties and the uncles and the cousins, right down to the toddlers and the baby. The grown-ups reminisced around the picnic table, the more adventurous playing hacky sack on the lawn. The littlest kids ran about half naked, with water balloons and Christmas toys, laughing and whooping in the sun. That day, all of it, was a gift.

In the days after Tom left, practical love rallied around, in a way that it does only for those who are loved the most deeply. Neighbours and friends appeared, letting themselves quietly in through the side gate. Someone shovelled the bark chips in the driveway onto the garden beds. The lawns were mowed. The edges were done. The plants were watered.

There’d been a slow leak in the back tyre of the Hyundai – Tom had noticed it the week before – and someone took the keys and got it sorted. No big deal, happy to help.

It wasn’t wordy or embellished, like the flourishes of a sympathy card. It was just love.

There will be no answers, not for his girls, not for anyone. Something was wrong with Tom’s heart. Not the way it loved, but the way it beat. And whatever it was, it could not be fixed, because no one knew it was there. When Tom’s heart stopped it broke the hearts of everyone – from his girls to his friends, from his neighbours to his workmates – all around him.

There are some things that not even practical love can mend.

We said our goodbyes. We set out on the return trip home on New Year’s Eve. The weather was grey and hot, neither one thing nor the other, with strangely close clouds suffocating empty paddocks. It didn’t make sense, made no sense at all.

Love and grief hold hands, especially at this time of year. They sit side by side at Christmas dinner, mingle around the tree. They have plenty to talk about, because they’ve got a lot in common.

The measure of a person is the hole he leaves. That hole is equal in size to the love he gave and the love he received. It’s just common sense.

And Tom was a practical guy.