Haere Ra (Good bye)

On Saturday, I went to a funeral.

At our race, the previous week, one of our Waka Ama team members died suddenly.  He wasn't paddling.  Since our club hosted the race, duties like the time keeping, safety briefing, waka inspecting were the responsibility of the more senior members of the club.   He was on one of the support boats when it happened.  He was 41 years old.

I'm not sure the exact cause of death because over the last seven days, there really hasn't been an appropriate moment to ask and frankly, it doesn't matter whether it was an aneurysm or a heart attack, he's still gone.

I went to practice on Tuesday night completely oblivious because I'd had to leave immediately after my race on Saturday and was not there when the tragedy occurred.  I arrived at our ramp to find that I was the only car in the parking lot.  I called my coach.

"You don't know?" she gasped, "Have you seen the canoes?"

I flipped on my high beams and there, in the glare of the lights I could see that all of the wakas had been draped in leis.

There would be no practice for the rest of the week.

At the service, the man's mum spoke.  She was quiet, gentle and dignified.  Her grief was raw and left the back of my throat aching with unshed tears.  "No parent should ever have to bury her child," she whispered.

His partner, a lovely woman from Germany, spoke, as well.  "He was the love of my life," she said.

His boss, a colleague, his friends and his brothers, all talked about how generous, loyal and happy he was and how he positively influenced the lives of all that he met.  A slide show of pictures played through the whole service and in shot after shot, my teammate was smiling, surrounded by people, fully engaged. His life was very obviously rich with people who loved him.

At the end of the service, all of us who participate in Waka Ama, filed outside to give our mate a proper send off.  We lined up on either side of the hearse and as the casket was brought down the steps of the church, we raised our paddles in a canopy.

As the hearse doors were closed, a lone male stood in the clearing behind it and called out the first couple of sentences of a haka.  It raised the hair on the back of my neck.  He was joined by one of our female teammates.  Then, several in the crowd chimed in.  They raged, pummeled their hands against their chests in unison and said good bye in a way that had me sobbing.

It was a fitting end to the most emotional funeral I've ever attended.  I wish I had been fortunate enough to have known him for more than the blink of an eye.

Today, he leaves New Zealand for the last time.  He had always expressed the desire to be taken back to the Cook Islands, to Raratonga, to be buried in the family plot when the time came.  Today, he goes home.

Haere Ra, Tai.