Pohutakawa in flower, Wellington 2024

Return, replenish, revive, reset. All the re- words. The ones that bring you back - to people, to places, to yourself.

Returning here, to this newsletter, after an absence. After leaving a job of two decades that was so much more than a job, the leaving of which took all I had - all my attention and focus and heart. In a good way. An ending that now makes space for a beginning.

Returning to London after 6 weeks in New Zealand, which in itself was a return to my birth country. I initially wrote home, because a trip back always sparks lots of thoughts about what and where is home. I have lived in London for 25 years, just over half of my life, so more time here than in Aotearoa. My home is here, and yet. So many people I love, friends and family, are half a world away. As are the pohutakawa trees which were in flower during this trip. The harakeke, the sound of tui, the lakes, rivers, and creeks, the Tasman Sea, Cook Straight and the Pacific Ocean. All these are in my blood and in my bones, which feel my return to Aotearoa with a deep gladness.

This was also a trip of honouring the dead, of scattering my parents ashes and returning to the lower North Island for the first time since Mum’s death two years ago. When you live on the other side of the world it is easy to think, somewhere in the back of your brain, that the person is still there, that they just haven’t answered the phone in a while, that really, all of this has been a dream and they’ll be there when you finally return, when life gets back to normal. In Mum’s case standing at the kitchen bench, apron on, the food processor that only worked on the pulse setting about to whir into action.

I went to Clive in Hawkes Bay, where Mum lived at the end of her life, but other people were living in her house. She wasn’t at her sisters up on the hill above Havelock North, looking out to sea. I drove over the Saddle Road and down to Levin, which is close to Koputaroa, where Mum grew up, and Shannon, and the farm where I grew up. I stayed with Felicity and Ian, who had looked after us when we were little, so it was very comforting and familiar, but part of me was waiting. Waiting to go home.

And I did - kind of. Felicity, Ian and I went, with the kind permission of the people now living there, back to our family home where Mum and Dad lived for the 42 years of their married life. To the garden they created, every tree planted by them except the big macrocarpa where the heron lived. To the fish ladder at the bottom of the drive. To the view of the hills, the Tararua Rangers, the backbone and constant companion of my childhood.

But Mum wasn’t there either. She wasn’t shopping in the single street of shops in Shannon. She wasn’t at my aunts when we went to visit with my brothers and their families, nor was she at Kereru, the family homestead where she was born. There was only one slight possibility - Wellington, where we were having a family reunion that surely she would turn up to. Late, but there. Not there.

So then I spent three days in Island Bay, traversing the rocks and looking out to Cook Straight. I had reached the end of the line, the southernmost edge of the North Island. I could see the outline of the Kaikoura Rangers of the South Island, where I was flying to next but Mum was never going to be there - the South Island being a place that she visited, never lived. This was it.

Looking out to Cook Strait from Island Bay, across Taputeranga Island.

Grief is a strange and mysterious companion, and for a while, this ‘getting to the end of the line’ undid me. It came on the back of other goodbyes, of seeing elderly beloved relatives that I know I won’t see again, and saying goodbye to them. Living half a world away from those you love is a work out for your heart.

No matter how much we prepare, no matter how much we can know it is coming, the physical absence of someone is always deeply disorientating. And even more so when we don’t live in the place that the person was, so we can’t get our heads - and even more our hearts and our bodies - around it step by step, day by day, visit by visit. The titration of grief, of absence. When my Dad died my Mum continued living in our family home, so when we went back to visit, even though we kept waiting for him to come in the the back door and put to put the kettle on, his presence was imbued in the yellow and orange kitchen wallpaper, in the bricks he laid throughout the garden.

The windowsill in front of my desk where I write has objects on it belonging to people that have died - a wooden turtle my friend James took to exams for good luck, a translucent pear paper weight belonging to my Uncle Christopher, the Condamine bell that sat on Dad’s desk, from his time working in the Australian outback. All of them connect me to each person, as I learn a new way of communicating with them, a different way of talking.

What I found hard about this return to New Zealand was that while I, along with family and friends, had packed Mum’s house up in the week after she died, I was back in the UK when it was sold. I saw the photos in the real estate brochure, with her exuberant garden cut back to manageability for potential buyers, but on some level it wasn’t real.

That needed my return, another moment in the ongoing tending of this grief. It needed me to re-visit people and places and drink from the well of shared stories and memories, and of community and life continuing, Mum’s 5 year old granddaughter danced on the homestead lawn.

And so now I’m back in London and the frost and rain, the beautiful bare trees. Back to oak and beech, to winter and candles lit at 4pm. Returned to our flat that is my home, to my desk and this page. Getting over the fuzziness of jet lag but navigating new lupus medication. Reorientating myself to being based at home, after twenty years of heading into the same office, working in a place and with people that were central to my life.

So I’m asking myself the question I always do after a trip - what am I returning with? What am I bringing back from the time of re-connecting in New Zealand, from this latest traversing of the territory that is grief? From this latest lupus flare, this growling that I can hear from the She-wolf, what is she telling me? And the bigger questions of what am I harvesting from my twenty years of building and leading a team, what comes with me, in terms of learning and experience, insights and knowledge? How and what does this then become something to offer, my next stage of work, one that ties all of the above together?

The answers to that are coming: on the page, in drawings, in mind-maps across every surface in our living room. Loads of conversations, lots of walks, lots of reflecting as I map out what has been, make patterns and connections, and incubate the vision of what comes next. A big part of that is working out what this Substack newsletter is, what it becomes. This is really exciting, and it feels so good to be able to devote more time and space to working on this. And while I’m doing that, a few recordings for you, from my contribution to Wave Twenty Winter 2024 iamb - poetry seen and heard.

Looking forward to sharing the ongoing evolution of this Substack page with you, more to come next week,

Until then,

Rachel

P.S. Some questions to explore or ponder on, if you like that kind of thing:

1. What did you bring back with you, the last time you went away? If it’s something physical, what made you choose that thing, what were you hoping it would remind you of? If it was an insight or new perspective, how has that changed, in big or small ways, how you go about your days, or your understanding of the world?

2. Maybe you haven’t been able, for all sorts of reasons, to go anywhere. But we are always in a sense returning - from conversations, from big life events, from the day. What do we bring back with us, what is the boon of our experiences?

3. How might we offer that boon to others, to share the stories of our experiences, to offer a hand that says we’re all in this together, this thing called life.

Would love to hear your answers in the comments below, equally you might find yourself mulling over these as you wash the dishes, commute to the work or pour your morning coffee.

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