I just wanted to share a (multi-post) story about a person who was a fantastic friend to me and many other people. This is some journalling I did when she died at age 88 last year. Even people who didn't know Alice will be able to get an idea of the sort of person she was and why she was such a lighthouse. And at the same time, this is a reflection on mortality and a life well lived.
The scanned poems from her funeral booklet are her personal favourites and very much sum up her life philosophy. She celebrated being different, in herself and in other people - the many ways of being different and valuable because of it.
I want to share Alice with you all, and Rob too. ♥
REQUIEM FOR A FRIEND
August 30, 2021
FOR ALICE AND ROB, WITH LOVE AND THANKS
What’s on my mind this morning is that a dear long-time friend’s time is running out. She is in a coma and not expected to live more than 48 hours. Alice is 88.
She got gestational diabetes with her last child and has been managing this condition for decades, living life to the full regardless. In recent years, the diabetes has become more debilitating and she’s had spells of feeling very poorly. On the weekend, she decided she’d had enough and she stopped taking her diabetes medication. She is at home and surrounded by family. It is a peaceful way to go and it’s typical of Alice that she remains the author of her own life right until the end. We all love Alice.
I met her around the time I turned 30 and was agonising about how old this was. Meeting her soon set me right, and I’ve never bothered with “OMG-how-old-am-I” again. Here was a truly vibrant, thoughtful, wise, compassionate, creative, contrary, funny and beautiful older person who didn’t conform to any of the standard stereotypes of what older people are supposed to do – she was simply who she was. She wasn’t an age, she was Alice; and that was the first of many important things she taught me by example over the subsequent two decades.
Alice came with Rob – the two had just retired from farming in Kojonup and moved to town. I didn’t learn for a number of years that the reason for their retirement was that Rob randomly caught a virus that impaired his heart, so that even small exertions like walking up the stairs now caused him to run out of breath – and for an energetic person who’d always darted around like one of his sheepdogs, that must have been very difficult. You’d never have known talking to him at his house though – he was perpetually cheerful and ready to laugh, full of stories, reading detective books, pulling people’s legs – especially Alice’s. She’d come in with a bunch of flowers purchased at the florist’s, and he’d say, tongue firmly in his cheek, “How much money have you spent now, woman?” She’d reply, “Well, Rob, dear, you knew when you married me that I am high-maintenance. I’m keeping all the receipts to put in your coffin and you’ll be well-cushioned.”
Rob had a workshop under the house and made beautiful and quirky things from bits of old farm machinery and general scraps: Comical animals, candle holders, miscellaneous useful things. He made a wrought-iron gate as a present for one of his friends, and he taught me how to use an electric drill – a skill I’d missed out on because of notions of gender roles. One week later, Brett and I were building our farm shed from kit.
When we’d bought our smallholding, Rob gave us an old adze he’d used for decades to make post-and-rail fencing. We planted over 5,000 native trees and understorey plants with it over the next handful of years. When we look at our tree lines, we think of Rob, and of all the trees he and Alice had planted on their farm, albeit with the help of actual machinery!
The year after I met Brett, Rob got a new breadmaker from one of his grandchildren. I’d had many a slice of fresh spelt bread from his trusty old breadmaker at this point. He said to me, “I love my old breadmaker, there’s nothing wrong with it, but my grandkids are going to be sad if I don’t use the modern thing they gave me. Would you like my old breadmaker? You’re getting married, now you’ll have two people to eat bread and it will be worth it.” So I started baking my own bread – and that same year Rob and Alice signed the paperwork as official witnesses at our wedding, because who better was there to ask than those two, married longer than anyone else we knew and fabulous people.
14 years later, Rob’s beloved old breadmaker still makes our bread, and we get our flour from a farm just up the road from where he and Alice used to farm. We think of Rob each time the fragrance of baking bread fills our house, and when we tip a loaf of bread onto the cooling rack, and when we see guests enjoying a slice of freshly baked bread made from local wholemeal stoneground flour and extras like sunflower seeds, walnuts etc. Just like I used to enjoy that treat at his place, and from the same breadmaker.
We buried Rob a decade ago. He made it to his 80th birthday party in good spirits and soon afterwards was hospitalised with pneumonia, not for the first time. This time he had an embolism while there, and didn’t come out again. At his funeral, hundreds of people took turns putting eucalyptus leaves on his coffin – a coffin made from the same rough wood as is used for woolbales, and delivered to the chapel on the back of a farm ute, in line with his wishes. And then everybody rallied around Alice.
Alice missed Rob terribly and always carried a picture of him in her purse wherever she went. Nothing ever filled that specific void for her, and nothing ever can. She learnt to live with it, which is all you can do. There was consolation in her enormous extended family, in her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a vast proportion of whom are interesting people doing creative and worthwhile things. And of course she continued to have an ultra-active social life with oodles of friends, participating in all sorts of mental and physical stuff including Tai Chi and University of the Third Age (academic lectures for seniors).
Only a couple of months ago, on a trip to town, walking up York Street, we spied Alice in an eatery, sitting by the window, and went in to say hello. Bear hugs and lively chatter followed. And we laughed, all three of us, because it was always like that. With the best people, you will share your laughter and your tears, your joy and your sorrow, your successes and your failures, and each other’s books and music – and Alice is that type of person. She’s also the type of person you would bump into impromptu in town on many occasions, because she seemed to have a talent for being in several places at once.
I’m thinking of Alice, slipping away now, and how I’ll miss her, as I miss Rob. I’m thinking how grateful I am to have known both of them, and how they changed my life for the better in so many different ways, both by their friendship and by their example. I carry both of them in my heart and always will; they continue to affect how I see the world, and there will always be a bit of them present in the work I do and the choices I make, and particularly in consciously working on kindness, which both of them embodied so well.
Farewell, Alice. ♥
The scanned poems from her funeral booklet are her personal favourites and very much sum up her life philosophy. She celebrated being different, in herself and in other people - the many ways of being different and valuable because of it.
I want to share Alice with you all, and Rob too. ♥
REQUIEM FOR A FRIEND
August 30, 2021
FOR ALICE AND ROB, WITH LOVE AND THANKS
What’s on my mind this morning is that a dear long-time friend’s time is running out. She is in a coma and not expected to live more than 48 hours. Alice is 88.
She got gestational diabetes with her last child and has been managing this condition for decades, living life to the full regardless. In recent years, the diabetes has become more debilitating and she’s had spells of feeling very poorly. On the weekend, she decided she’d had enough and she stopped taking her diabetes medication. She is at home and surrounded by family. It is a peaceful way to go and it’s typical of Alice that she remains the author of her own life right until the end. We all love Alice.
I met her around the time I turned 30 and was agonising about how old this was. Meeting her soon set me right, and I’ve never bothered with “OMG-how-old-am-I” again. Here was a truly vibrant, thoughtful, wise, compassionate, creative, contrary, funny and beautiful older person who didn’t conform to any of the standard stereotypes of what older people are supposed to do – she was simply who she was. She wasn’t an age, she was Alice; and that was the first of many important things she taught me by example over the subsequent two decades.
Alice came with Rob – the two had just retired from farming in Kojonup and moved to town. I didn’t learn for a number of years that the reason for their retirement was that Rob randomly caught a virus that impaired his heart, so that even small exertions like walking up the stairs now caused him to run out of breath – and for an energetic person who’d always darted around like one of his sheepdogs, that must have been very difficult. You’d never have known talking to him at his house though – he was perpetually cheerful and ready to laugh, full of stories, reading detective books, pulling people’s legs – especially Alice’s. She’d come in with a bunch of flowers purchased at the florist’s, and he’d say, tongue firmly in his cheek, “How much money have you spent now, woman?” She’d reply, “Well, Rob, dear, you knew when you married me that I am high-maintenance. I’m keeping all the receipts to put in your coffin and you’ll be well-cushioned.”
Rob had a workshop under the house and made beautiful and quirky things from bits of old farm machinery and general scraps: Comical animals, candle holders, miscellaneous useful things. He made a wrought-iron gate as a present for one of his friends, and he taught me how to use an electric drill – a skill I’d missed out on because of notions of gender roles. One week later, Brett and I were building our farm shed from kit.
When we’d bought our smallholding, Rob gave us an old adze he’d used for decades to make post-and-rail fencing. We planted over 5,000 native trees and understorey plants with it over the next handful of years. When we look at our tree lines, we think of Rob, and of all the trees he and Alice had planted on their farm, albeit with the help of actual machinery!
The year after I met Brett, Rob got a new breadmaker from one of his grandchildren. I’d had many a slice of fresh spelt bread from his trusty old breadmaker at this point. He said to me, “I love my old breadmaker, there’s nothing wrong with it, but my grandkids are going to be sad if I don’t use the modern thing they gave me. Would you like my old breadmaker? You’re getting married, now you’ll have two people to eat bread and it will be worth it.” So I started baking my own bread – and that same year Rob and Alice signed the paperwork as official witnesses at our wedding, because who better was there to ask than those two, married longer than anyone else we knew and fabulous people.
14 years later, Rob’s beloved old breadmaker still makes our bread, and we get our flour from a farm just up the road from where he and Alice used to farm. We think of Rob each time the fragrance of baking bread fills our house, and when we tip a loaf of bread onto the cooling rack, and when we see guests enjoying a slice of freshly baked bread made from local wholemeal stoneground flour and extras like sunflower seeds, walnuts etc. Just like I used to enjoy that treat at his place, and from the same breadmaker.
We buried Rob a decade ago. He made it to his 80th birthday party in good spirits and soon afterwards was hospitalised with pneumonia, not for the first time. This time he had an embolism while there, and didn’t come out again. At his funeral, hundreds of people took turns putting eucalyptus leaves on his coffin – a coffin made from the same rough wood as is used for woolbales, and delivered to the chapel on the back of a farm ute, in line with his wishes. And then everybody rallied around Alice.
Alice missed Rob terribly and always carried a picture of him in her purse wherever she went. Nothing ever filled that specific void for her, and nothing ever can. She learnt to live with it, which is all you can do. There was consolation in her enormous extended family, in her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a vast proportion of whom are interesting people doing creative and worthwhile things. And of course she continued to have an ultra-active social life with oodles of friends, participating in all sorts of mental and physical stuff including Tai Chi and University of the Third Age (academic lectures for seniors).
Only a couple of months ago, on a trip to town, walking up York Street, we spied Alice in an eatery, sitting by the window, and went in to say hello. Bear hugs and lively chatter followed. And we laughed, all three of us, because it was always like that. With the best people, you will share your laughter and your tears, your joy and your sorrow, your successes and your failures, and each other’s books and music – and Alice is that type of person. She’s also the type of person you would bump into impromptu in town on many occasions, because she seemed to have a talent for being in several places at once.
I’m thinking of Alice, slipping away now, and how I’ll miss her, as I miss Rob. I’m thinking how grateful I am to have known both of them, and how they changed my life for the better in so many different ways, both by their friendship and by their example. I carry both of them in my heart and always will; they continue to affect how I see the world, and there will always be a bit of them present in the work I do and the choices I make, and particularly in consciously working on kindness, which both of them embodied so well.
Farewell, Alice. ♥
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