Mum was naturally shattered by Dad’s death. She felt that but for the cancer, they could have had several years of active life together and she felt this loss keenly. However, she didn’t dwell on the what-ifs or bemoan her fate. She simply set out to learn how to live a useful life without him. There were moments when she would feel a gut-punch of grief – a piece of music, a particular scene or when she was confronted by a task that he would have always done, but she kept these to herself and learned how to contain them and so contain their impact. 

Initially, her efforts mainly involved learning how to run her home life on her own and looking after the things that supported this, like the house and car. There was thought, one thing that she and Dad had always done together, that she wanted to master on her own: to sail Shadowfox and spend time exploring the coast. She took Minnie off on short trips to Kawau and the Mahurangi in that first year. These were probably lonely affairs, but they were mostly successfully executed, where she got to where she wanted to go and got back without mishap. I say mostly, because four days into her last trip – to the Mahurangi, she rang me to ask if I would help sail back to Sandspit. It had been blowing incessantly from the north-east for several days and it was just too strong for her to motor back into. As it was, it was a sail that I would have struggled to complete on my own.

After this trip, she felt that she had proved to herself that she could do it. However, the experience wasn’t the same without Dad. I also suspect that it was too much of a reminder of what she had lost, so she decided that her cruising days were over. We made a concerted effort to sell Shadowfox, but no one was willing to pay anything like her value. Meanwhile, I had persuaded myself that she might suit us well as a coastal cruiser, notwithstanding that Alice and Cameron weren’t at the time, particularly keen on spending time on a small boat with Mum and Dad. Karen, too, was not that enthusiastic. Still, as it suited me, I decided to buy her. I kept her on the pile mooring at Sandspit and used Mum’s place as a base, which worked perfectly. Pip later went into shares with me, and we had many years of happy sailing around the Gulf and up the coast in her.

Mum would not join us on any of these trips, but she always showed great interest in where we went and what we did, and she retained the job of washing the linen that came off the boat after each trip. A bag of crisp and nicely folded sheets and towels was always available for the next person to take Shadowfox out for a sail.

During this time, Mum took to walking with a vengeance. She had daily walks around the Green Road peninsula and down the hill to the estuary (a walk she would do most days for the next nineteen years), stepped up the number of walking group trips she went on, and began planning some multi-day trips on her own and with the family. There was a family walk on the Routeburn track in 1999 and she walked the Tora Trail with Jude and Kate later that year. In following years, she walked the Heaphy and Queen Charlotte Tracks, and did a multi-day walk around the Banks Peninsula.

There were other family adventures as well. In 2001, she joined Rosemarie Jephcoate, Sidney Smith, and me on a paddle down the Wanganui River and repeated this with the whole whanau in 2003. She joined the whanau on a rafting trip down the Buller River in 2008 and had many smaller tramps and trips away with various family members in both the South and North Island. Pip took her on helicopter flights over the Southern Alps and trips up into the hills in places like the Wilkin River near Makarora. Dad would have joined her on a few of these, so she was now making the most of the opportunities to do these things independently and with others. Yvonne, Charlie and I took her on several roadies around the North Island where we explored Wellington, Taranaki, and tracks and huts in the Tongariro National Park and she came down to Taupo to support John and a few other casual bikers in the annual Around Taupo Ride.

There were also several overseas trips she took with family in the years after Dad died. She and I had an incredible trip to Vietnam in 2002, not long after the country had been opened up to tourists. It was her first trip into Asia beyond a short stop-over in Singapore on the way to the United Kingdom, and she was quite smitten. She also joined Yvonne, Charlie and me in winter trips to Rarotonga (2011) and to Fiji (2014) where she got to experience again, a small part of her beloved Pacific Island. 

John and Jude took her to China in 2012 and to Turkey and Bulgaria in 2015 where they explored Gallipoli and joined the ANZAC commemorations. It was in Bulgaria that she stole a cutting of a geranium which she smuggled back into New Zealand – something that was against all our nation’s biosecurity rules and something that horrified her son who was at the time, responsible for biosecurity matters in the Bay of Plenty. However, said son still has the plant that she grew from that cutting and there are now several propagules around that derive from it.

Soon after the Millennium, Mum’s old boyfriend from her teenage years contacted her and invited her to join him and the Charolais Breeders Association on a tour of South Island Charolais breeders. Tom was still farming and breeding Charolais on the family farm at Paerau in the Maniatoto. His wife had died some years before and he was keen to have feminine company on these tours. Mum agreed and so began a series of trips she had with Tom around New Zealand and Australia on Charolais business and several trips to the Maniatoto to spend time with Tom and his family. She enjoyed his company, reconnecting with the Maniatoto, and of course, thoroughly enjoyed exploring new places and getting reacquainted with some old ones. These trips continued up until Tom’s death in 2008.

Circa 2004 Tom Aitkin

Mum was a wonderful travelling companion. She was endlessly curious and interested in what she saw and the people she met. She never complained and took the inevitable glitches in the programme with complete equanimity. In her self-deprecating way, she would say that she needed travelling companions to look after her. In practice, she could do this on her own well into the second decade of the century. 

At some stage soon after Dad died, she bought a brand-new car – a little green Mazda. Apart from that horrible Simca, it was the first new car she had ever owned, and she was very proud of it. She was a confident driver, at least in the earlier years after Dad died, and would happily take herself off to Whitford to visit Kay and Malcolm. She drove down to the Bay of Plenty several times to stay with Yvonne, Charlie and me, and to the Wairarapa to stay with John and Jude. The South Island was a step too far to drive, but she did get to fly down to visit Pip and Lynne on occasions, and also to revisit Clachanburn.

In the years after Dad’s death, there were several family gatherings for significant birthdays and weddings. Christmas gatherings still occurred at her Green Road home, and we ate well. We always found some corner of the house to bed down the horde. Mum tried hard to sit back, and befitting her dowager status, allowing others to run around, preparing meals and cleaning up afterwards. She was not wholly successful in this, but she loved having her children and grandchildren around her. When these gatherings at her home got too much for her, Kay and Malcolm took over the Christmas Day management, hosting family and friends at their camp at Scandrett’s. 

There were lots of weddings – Lizzie and Mark were the first at John and Jude’s small block in Masterton in 2006, closely followed by Gilly and James – on James’ parents block at Coatesville. Richard and Lisa were married at the Chateau at Ruapehu in 2008 and Wick and Yvonne at Ascension Vineyard in Warkworth in 2009. Kate and Michael followed in 2011 on John and Jude’s farm in the Wairarapa, and Danny and Thomas at Danny’s parents’ kiwifruit orchard at Katikati in 2014. Sam and Jazz were married in 2018 on Pip and Lynne’s block at Clyde, and Rachel and Rob in 2019 in Auckland.

Back at home, she established a new routine around her daily life that encompassed walks in the neighbourhood, chats with friends and neighbours, time in the garden, entertaining the regular stream of visitors, and reading. In these latter years, with a little more time on her hands, her garden was magnificent – a little wild and haphazard but always a riot of colour. She would often get visits from gardening groups, gracefully accepting their compliments, but always downplaying her efforts. Over these years too, she propagated pohutukawa and planted them in any spot down Green Road where she thought they might escape the ravages of the roading gangs. Almost all of these survived and are still flourishing today.

Another regular pastime she had during this period was rowing around the Matakana Estuary at high tide. She still had Mehitabel, an old ten-foot wooden dinghy that was as heavy as lead but would row quite well. These forays always involved a survey of the shoreline for new driftwood that came down the river on the tide, wood that would be gathered up and carried back to her woodshed and used in her kitchen chip-heater. For more significant bits that she couldn’t get into the dinghy, she’d enlist the help of visiting children or grandchildren to recover, and she’d be quite distressed if a subsequent tide took it away before she could get her hands on it. 

The chip-heater was a pleasure that she persevered with for years. It appealed to her frugal tendencies as it allowed her to turn off the hot water heater when she didn’t have house guests, but it also appealed to the pyromaniac in her. She always enjoyed feeding a fire and loved backing up to one to toast her bum.

She became very close to her community at Green Road. Some friends, such as Stella and Charlie Candler, Jill and Colin Sargent, Laura Lynch, and Michael Henderson, contributed significantly to making her feel settled and at home in the community. She also helped take care of some of her older or less firm neighbours, and so felt she was adding to the glue that held the community together. However, by 2016, many of her old friends had either died or moved away and Mum became increasingly worried about her ability to cope on her own in her home. She was displaying only mild signs of the vascular dementia that would ultimately contribute to her death, but she was conscious of this, and it resulted in a growing anxiety and worry about how she would manage both herself and her home.

She had always expressed a horror of ‘old folks’ homes’ and only half-jokingly, would say we should shoot her if she needed to go into one, so it came as a surprise to us that in 2016, she declared that she wanted to go into Summerset Falls Village in Warkworth. This probably wasn’t easy for her, but it was a typically pragmatic and sensible decision for herself.

She bought an apartment licence in the Village and moved in, in April 2017, with minimal stress and absolutely no regrets or fuss on her part.

She remained in the apartment until early 2021. After a fall and some time in hospital, she moved into the hospital wing of the Village and died there on the 26^th of February 2022 at the age of 92.

These last twenty-four years without Dad had no doubt involved some lonely times. Still, she was remarkably successful in shaping a new life for herself and filled it with some extraordinary experiences. Her horizons never shrank, and she remained acutely interested in what she called ‘family doings’ and what was happening in the world. She remained an avid reader until quite near the end and would always enjoy a good discussion on socio-political issues of the time.

She was determined to make the most of the life she was given to the very end – and that she did.