If We Are Lucky – Dave Gorrie

If We Are Lucky Dave Gorrie

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Dave Gorrie

It was pretty freaky really. Salah and I were in bed and there was this

decent bloody thump, seemed like one big smash and we both jumped

out of bed to see that our son was okay but he was already standing

in a doorway. By the whole house was shaking, it was unbelievable, and what was weird was our son, Seth, had just got back from Samoa where he’d been attending a conference to do with earthquakes and

tsunami over there; and we were being rudely awakened with this damn

earthquake here… in Christchurch. He knew what was going on. He told us all about it while we stood around in the doorway waiting for it to all calm down.

As it stopped we went to go outside but we didn’t get very far. The

whole building had been rocked off its foundation and with the house out of kilter we couldn’t get outside at all. We had to prise our way out

of doors that didn’t want to open. Yes, it was crazy, we had to break out of our own home, the doors were all jammed shut.

By the time we got outside it was still dark. What we could see

was that our deck was no longer attached to the foundations and had

removed itself from the house. It was all pretty unbelievable. There was also literally a river coming down our driveway. Just clear water flowing

like a mountain stream. It was incredible. Later, when the light came, we realized there was liquefaction out the back and it wasn’t the river

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that flooded it was all this the water coming up out of the ground that

had flooded the roads around here big time. Even in the dark, however, we seemed to have dropped a significant amount from where we had

been just moments before. One minute you’re in bed asleep and the next you’re standing there in the dark staring at a different world. It was all pretty gob-smacking.

After it stopped it was really a case of making sure our two lots of

neighbours were okay. Next door we had a young couple who had a

little kid and on the other side an older couple with older kids, so that

was the first thing. We quickly checked on them and then it was family in our old house just up the road and some other older people we made sure were okay. When I’d done that there were tenants in some houses

we own, so off I went to see if they were all okay. Afterwards we walked

across the Dallington Bridge, which was a bit of a mess, to see if an elderly Dutch woman we knew was all right. She lived in Dallington

Terrace and her place got really smashed. She’d been by herself but when we found her she was sitting at a neighbours place. She was very

distraught. She had given up smoking before this happened, but by the time we found her she’d started again.

My middle son, Noah, lives around the road so he actually came

down here to see if we were okay. My eldest son, who lives in Lake Terrace Road, managed to drive over in his four-wheel drive. So

eventually we were all here. First thing to do then was to set up the

barbeque on the front deck. Salah was always sort of like the Matai, you know, head of the family really, so it seemed natural everyone would congregate around here in any case. In Samoa it’s really all about

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supplying food for the people. There was no power, so the barbeque was

it for breakfast. We cooked up a feed for all my lot and the neighbours as well. My sister-in-law lives in her house just up the road. She came down with her kids too. So we had a lot of people here. People having

coffee. People out the front there munching on bacon and eggs and sandwiches and just watching the craziness happen. We were trying

to be upbeat and positive to keep everyone’s spirit up. We were alive, it doesn’t really matter about houses or breakages or anything. Houses don’t matter, not if people can be alive. And that’s another part of the story that I’m going to tell you now.

Okay, we got smashed in the September earthquake. Well, Salah

and I sort of coped. Our house was trashed so it was a case of trying to normalise our life a little bit. As part of that Salah and a girlfriend went up to the Wearable Arts show in Wellington for a bit of R & R. When

she got there, she discovered a lump in her breast. When she came back she saw the doctors and ended up having surgery. The diagnosis

was breast cancer. A lump was removed and lymph nodes removed and

she also had to endure radiation treatment. Others things, earthquakes, whatever, went by the board as that came to the forefront of our lives.

February was a mess. Salah got back to work in January, she worked

as a nurse at Southern Cross Hospital. Usually she was on nightshift

but had gone in on the day of the earthquake, the twenty-second, for an annual appraisal. It was quite surreal. She was there when the

earthquake hit and ended up helping in Southern Cross with the patients and the staff there for a several hours.

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I was somewhere else. My oldest son, Kaylib, had been admitted

the day before to Christchurch Public Hospital with suspected viral

meningitis and that is where I was on the twenty-second, I’d been in to see him. He’d been transferred from A&E to the emergency observation ward, which is just next-door. After a time I left him there with his wife and I went to get their little boy. I picked up my grandson

who would then have been, what, a year and a bit old, and I was taking him back home. He and I were in my car coming down North Avon Road when the quake happened.

Instantly the roads turned into a real mess. I was driving through all

sorts of liquefaction and crap to get back home. Of course, I didn’t have

a phone and here’s my son, with a IV drip in his arm, severe headaches, and both he and Kathryn, his wife, absolutely freaking out—where’s our son. They had no idea what had happened.

When I arrive back at the house it’s been smashed again. Everything

is jammed and I can’t get inside. The driveway is a bloody river again

and the yard is full of liquefaction and crap. Finally, I managed to get in through a window and then prise open a door. My grandson was

still asleep. He slept right through the quake, which was great, and

I finally got him inside and settled down but then I was just frantic.

I did actually have a cell phone that my son had given me just that Christmas but I couldn’t get it to work. It was just hopeless.

Back in the hospital nobody much is around and of course they

were panicking about their boy. Then Kaylib starts pulling the IVF

fluids out—Kathryn’s a nurse as well so she helps him—and they go down to the car; he’s still in his hospital gown. They drove to their place

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in Lake Terrace Road and of course when they got there the place

was all over the show and no son. The driving was just crazy at that

point but my son is now just firing on adrenalin so he and his wife got on pushbikes and rode all the way over here. At last they know their

son is okay and are just so relieved but now Kaylib is spiking a huge temp and has become a blithering mess. At some point Salah gets back

from Southern Cross and so by now everyone has congregated around here once more. Luckily with Salah being a nurse, Kathryn being a

nurse and myself also a nurse, we were able to care for our boy, we got some meds and we knew what to do for him, but yeah, he was a real

mess. They did bloods eventually and it turned out he had most of the

markers for viral meningitis, but not, you know, full blown. It wasn’t good but he did get better.

February is much the same as September. Same shitty mess to deal

with, no power, etc. etc. but at least by this time we were reasonably

positive about the cancer issue. They’d got everything and, you know, things were sweet. We were going to be okay. If another earthquake has come and gone so what, we’re all alive, and again that resilience factor

kicked in, everyone was supportive and encouraging. Okay, it’s pretty frustrating having more liquefaction to shovel and we might have to move around a bit but we’ve still got a house that’s fixable and that means we can keep living here together with our beautiful river view.

There are certain experiences in life that can teach you things.

Important things. I can remember when we first got married I was

working for my stepfather as a wood turner in the mornings and I was a supervisor at the hospital in the afternoon shift and I could

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never figure out why we had no money, but Salah would always be

forking out money for her dad to go back to Samoa, or extra money

for her mum to buy things for her younger siblings, so I was always broke. It took me a while to understand that but eventually I sorted

it—okay, that’s what it’s about— and so I’ve tried to go with the flow.

Part of me is Scottish, the bit where I like the idea of capitalism, so I

tended to save what I could and buy houses, but then, you know, the family would rent them for next to nothing. Salah was New Zealand

born too, so while she’d been exposed to a lot of Samoan ways she was

also a displaced person in terms of the language. ‘Don’t teach your

daughter your language because she’s got to become part of the New

Zealand way,’ type of thing. But culturally she’s so much Samoan it was ridiculous. So yeah, that was quite a unique experience for a Scotts/

Irish fella to be immersed in, the giving and caring of Samoan culture.

You wonder sometimes how do two different people get together,

become one. The thing is, if we are lucky—very lucky—we get the

chance to share our life with someone who helps us grow into what we can be. I was really lucky. I met and fell in love with Salah. Together we

raised our family and from her I’ve learnt a whole lot of things. Stuff I could never have learnt from anyone else. I’m not sure how. Perhaps

just being close to each other for such a long time. Like osmosis, you know, you become one. It’s almost like you’re sleeping with someone

and then some amazing connection occurs in the middle of the night.

Osmosis. You learn stuff. I learnt about the blending of cultures. I learnt

about respect, about compatibility, about love. And I learnt about time and how quickly it can go.

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I suppose we grew up together really. We had our kids, went through

the Muldoon era buying property, investing in property and making

decisions together. Doing stuff together with the kids. Yeah, what is

it that makes the difference? Time, perhaps, and probably in the end, honesty. Are you prepared to have a damn good spat with each other, to

sort things out, and to stick with it. I learnt about honesty and I came to understand stickability, determination, resilience, the sort of things we might all need to get through these earthquakes. Probably it’s

immeasurable in in real terms. It’s not necessarily anything concrete. I mean it’s not just about things you might have done together or any pot of gold you think you might end up with. It’s if you can stick through the good and the bad and keep working together, with at least a few

common goals. Your thoughts are not always going to be the same. But persisting and not giving up, honouring the commitments you made all those years ago, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, hmm – I

don’t know if that’s a total answer. In simple terms what you can say is, just tough it out. Things get better. They get remarkably better. Our

marriage was like a great wine really, not that I’m a wine drinker, but, you know, they talk about wine getting better as it ages. So yeah, maybe that’s an answer, give it time.

Sadly that’s what we are now running out of—I need to tell you

a bit more. Just after Easter, Salah went to Samoa with all her sisters and they took a friend. There are some photos up there on the wall of sisters and girlfriends. There’s some nieces there also, two nieces. The lady with the white hat, that’s my sister-in-law and the good-looking

girl with the sunnies, that’s Salah. They all went over to Samoa for a

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girls’ break and tragically, when Salah was there, she discovered a lump

in her neck and ended up on a return flight to Christchurch. The biopsy was not good news. Unfortunately, the breast cancer proved to be quite an aggressive bugger and it had spread. She had had some pain in her chest

wall and also some bony metastases there as well, so things turned to crap for us.

Suddenly it was very serious indeed. The end result after seeing an

oncologist was that the prognosis wasn’t great at all. This was an aggressive bloody cancer and the prognosis was frankly disastrous.

Salah herself was always quite upbeat. ‘I’ve got five years,’ she’d say, but

in fact the reality was the oncologists were not saying that, no, nowhere

near that amount of time. So how do you deal with it? I don’t know. I don’t

know. Probably I dealt with it just by being busy. Salah too, kept working

all the way through. The June quake came along and smacked us again.

There was more of everything, more of the same, and it was just awful. Of

course, we tried to value the important things like the garden and the river

view but can you imagine life with cancer and having to tolerate piles of

shit and shingle up to here. You know, no power. No sewer. It’s just the pits.

But Salah was strong, so strong. Yeah, it was the rest of us, you know,

we were aware of what she was putting up with. Living here in a smashed house and nothing was being done. The sewers weren’t working and it was

just horrible. We had no water for ages, all the usual things, so yeah, how do you cope? I don’t know. You just endure really, because you’ve got no other option.

And then if the quakes weren’t enough we got bloody snow falls

as well. Though I will say one thing about the snow, it made the place

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look pretty. Instead of looking out the window and seeing where all these contractors had just piled up loads of crap, at least the snow now

covered it all up. I can’t tell you what the river view meant to us. The crazy thing was I never really wanted to move into an old place but

after a period of time here I became so accustomed to this magnificent

view, the neighbours, the garden, the location, it was all so special. We spent so much time at peace with this beautiful river… yes, peace; I suppose that’s what it offers you really.

So the year moved on and June – June was much the same really

wasn’t it. Bit more liquefaction; bit more of the same grotty conditions.

It was around that time they told us we were red zoned. Today, there is only myself and one other neighbour still here. Maybe as few as ten people between here and the bridge, everyone else has deserted.

Salah by then was having private treatment through St Georges

Healthcare but with the prognosis being confirmed she was keen to switch to the public system under Bridget Robinson. She started

chemotherapy hopeful of doing what she could to live for as long as she could. She had several admissions to Ward Twenty-Seven at public

because of her low white blood count. But she was always very brave and full of hope. We planned after Christmas to go down to Te Anau

and Fiordland, one of those bucket list things you think about. Salah was still working her night shift at Southern Cross. They were really busy there so she kept on working. And that was Salah—work—caring for others, that was the basis of who Salah was. She was Samoan and that’s what Samoans do. My own culture, you know, I’d want to know how much things cost, but not Salah, she’d be giving the stuff away.

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We had a session here at one point where her two sisters chopped

her hair of—knowing that it was all going to fall off anyway—in

preparation for getting a wig. She ended up with a wig that she hated, but never-the-less, she kept working.

She wasn’t using very much pain relief and then these really severe

headaches started over time with the pain going down into her neck.

She was in a lot of pain by then, but somehow she kept working and

tolerating it until the time came when she just couldn’t anymore. She had begun to feel woozy and her balance was starting to go.

Salah had selected a GP to help care for her as she was dying. And

there were the Nurse Maude palliative care people, they came here and assisted us in managing her symptoms at home. And of course, there was myself and our daughter-in-law and Salah’s sister who is a nurse also. I tried to make the place the best I could for her. I used a large

Samoan tapa cloth we had to cover a lot of cracks on the back wall of the lounge. But the worst part was that our sewer wasn’t working very well and there were lots of people here. I didn’t want to ask anyone else

to sort that out and so here am I out there shoveling shit, you know, while my wife was in here dying. You can see why the earthquakes, to

me, were just a dirty background to my wife’s death. The December

quake, what was that, just another blip. Anyway, all her other sisters and all my boys, we all nursed her at home until she died. She died in

this house, which is what she wanted to do. Being red zoned and told

we’d have to leave had caused a lot of anguish; I had thought that I wouldn’t be able to fulfill my wife’s wish—that she wouldn’t be able to die in our own home. Well, it turned out she won that one.

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We were gathered in the lounge, dining room area, in which there

is a big table—the one we are sitting at right now—and after she died

we brought her back here and had her coffin where this table is, with her feet in the kitchen because that’s where she spent so much of her

time. Salah there with us as we gathered around her in this brokendown house.

Things are still raw for me. Salah only died in November last year.

So, you know, it’s only a few months ago. Obviously, I miss her heaps and life… my life, will never be the same. Part of me just wants to

run away but with my children and grandchildren here, that won’t

be happening any time soon. Since Salah’s death it’s just been about

trying to do the basic tasks. One foot after the other. Keep your mind

busy for as long as possible. I suppose my future is to do whatever I can to honour Salah. We had planned to move into one of my new builds

and stay in the area and that’s what I’ll do. I’ll keep working for as long as I can and support my grandchildren and all my kids. I can’t provide what Salah did for them but I’ll do, and be, whatever I can for them.

There are links here too, part of where we use to live just up the

road—we used to call it a little Samoan village. Salah’s parents lived behind us for a number of years and Salah’s sister and her husband

and all the nieces and nephew all lived around us. You know, we built houses for all them to live in, so part of me wants to continue that legacy. I mean I acknowledge my limitations in doing that. I don’t want

to be the head of the family and I could never take on that role, it’s

not my right to do that. But I do want to try to be supportive of my Samoan family as much as I can.

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I’ve talked a lot about my own situation but today is the anniversary

of the February earthquake that was a huge and bloody tragedy with so many people losing their lives. It also destroyed a way of life in this

city didn’t it. A loss of identity really. The way they have just smashed

down buildings that potentially could have been saved. Even if they had kept them on the corner of the streets—just the odd house or

building—it would have given us something. But no, the heart of the city been ripped out and it’s the same with the river, what was once

a beautiful waterway filled with wildlife, it’s like it has been raped, totally ravaged. Our Dutch friend whose house was wrecked near the Dallington Bridge, she’s gone back to Holland now, but before all this happened she would walk the river with her dogs and take lots of photographs. Somewhere round here we’ve got a book that she put together. It reminds me now of what we have lost.

It makes me hope that somewhere in this horrible crazy situation,

someone in the city has got a master plan—you can hear the punch line now can’t you—‘Yes, we have, but God knows where it is.’

When you look at some of the things that are going on, there’s

no great evidence of much intelligent organization, is there. They just seem to be making up things as they go along. And I’ll tell you who

isn’t helping, the bloody insurance companies. We had a person who was supposed to be our case manager for this place who actually rang

Salah up and abused her. It was just disgusting. Sometime before we’d been to see a woman and said, ‘Look, we’re not getting any information from our case manager.’ She told us she would get back to us, that she would go and investigate. Of course we didn’t hear from her. But

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sometime later—while was out one day—Salah got a phone call from

our case manager saying you’ve made an official complaint against me, blah, blah, blah, and then he hung up on her. Salah was distraught.

Here she was dying of cancer and having to endure this bloody house and he’s ringing up saying, ‘You’ve gone and seen someone and said

I’m not doing anything.’ Well he bloody hadn’t been. The same guy was supposed to be the case manager for another house I’ve got up here in

Avonside Drive, our old family house in fact, and he didn’t even have it on his books. You know, it’s just hopeless.

On the whole there’s been a lack of personal empathy for us in the

red zone by our insurance companies. They need to communicate more.

It’s like they just avoid us. Okay, probably some of it is just personalities, we did have another case manager for one of my other houses who spontaneously rings up and informs us of what’s going on. So, they’re

not all bad. But come on, we need better communication from CERA, from insurance companies and even EQC. And that doesn’t mean just

putting stuff in the newspapers, it’s about someone actually ringing up

and saying, ‘Hey, this is what’s happening guys, rather than being left

in limbo. That’s all it takes. Someone saying this is what we are doing, and this is the reason for doing it.

Anyway, that’s enough about incompetence and insurance

companies. Today I’m looking out through my front window, over a

deck that looks onto the river and I can see the top of a City Council park bench that was left dumped on the side of the road. A bench that my son and I took and concreted into the riverbank and on it we put a

plaque in memory of Salah. I am looking out there now and I can see

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the road cones and the flowers that I’ve put there because today is the

twenty-second of February, one year on from that devastating quake.

Outside other people have been doing the same. Walking round the

river putting flowers on cones and I’m looking out at that and thinking, yeah, this place is special. Okay, I know the house will go but hopefully

the river view will stay and if it can stay as a park, a place we can all

share, then this area would be a good legacy to have for a beautiful wife and mother and grandmother, a woman who did so much in her life

for so many. To me, this view, this lovely river, would mean that Salah wouldn’t be forgotten. It’s a thought that gives me… yeah…it gives me a little peace.

To have had this place has just been magnificent, to have shared it

with my wife and family is beyond special. Earlier on, after the first couple of quakes, I thought our life would never be the same with our

home being smashed and that’s true, but in the end you realise houses

and land are not the most important thing. If people can be alive and

endure and move on, that is what counts. As hard as it is at the time we’ve all got to do it, try and move on a little bit. And now I am told

there is a plan—a park—that will make this place available to all. That

is what I hope will happen, because if the Council or the Government were to turn it into something else, into money, if they conspired to resurrect the land and sell off sections to the highest bidder, I would

be absolutely gutted. That… that would be like soiling on all our memories, wouldn’t it.

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