Birthdays, Graveyards and Private Jets

My husband turned a year older on Saturday and our son came down to join in our celebration. After a long drive into Christchurch we ended up eating at a very lively little spot near the wharf at Lyttelton Harbour. It was the perfect place to land for our disparate appetites and we all loved the food. The atmosphere was quirky but comfortable too and we sat in a conservatory that seemed to be part of the back patio but was covered and out of the wind. Our boy lives in Wellington and had taken an early flight on Thursday and we seem to be more alive whenever he visits, even if it’s just a short stint. Saturday was so much fun. The jokes never stopped coming. Mostly, I bear the brunt of them when those two get together, but in a friendly way.
Afterwards, my mate had the brilliant idea to try to locate his great grandmother’s grave, which he believed was somewhere in one of two Anglican cemeteries in Lyttelton, which we hoped housed her remains. So, without wasting time we set forth to roam the steep hillsides where gravestones were scattered all over the hillsides. The information center was closed as was the city council office, so pertinent information on her whereabouts was not readily available. The entire township had taken quite a beating about a decade ago when two major earthquakes hit the city and one had its epicenter just 5 kilometers under this township. We had stark reminders of this when we traipsed around two of the cemeteries and saw firsthand that many graves and gravestones were uprooted somewhat and lying on the ground in a twisted mess. Perhaps these will be repaired and repositioned at some future date but for now they are a reminder of the gruesome force of nature that shunted many fine places out of existence. We were in a grim location with disturbing reflections of past lives and past histories snuffed out despite the magnificent views of the sea and the hills beyond. As we lumbered our way from one gravesite to the next, some very elaborate and some quite plain, on a windswept day with a cold afternoon chill coming off the water nearby, we felt so lucky to be alive. Whether or not we found the site where Sarah Ellen Mason’s body lies, became less and less urgent. We know we’ll have to find out which graveyard has it and where it is in that location by talking to the experts with that data. But looking around and reading about other people’s exits from this earth plane has a sobering effect and we all returned to the car a little less buoyant than our moods right after our lunch.
We wouldn’t have even gone there at all if it hadn’t been for the book John just got from his sister, written by a cousin, who also was related to Sarah. The biography is about her and one of her daughters, who was the sister of John’s grandmother, Ethel Fairweather. Sarah seemed to be some sort of enigma. She’d come from Ireland to New Zealand married to somebody else, also Catholic with 3 kids, and once here, the husband had died when a tree fell on him. So eventually she married an Anglican policeman named Mason. They had 3 more children and she died young, in 1866. I don’t know the other details yet. John hasn’t gotten to them but I’m looking forward t reading about her and her daughter. Men can sometimes just get the gist of some things while women seem to get the real details. We even found the old Anglican church, actually rebuilt in the exact style of the original erected in 1851, but the churchyard bore no graves and the vicar wasn’t in when we visited.
But in any case, on Saturday we looked both forward for John and backwards towards Sarah, making for a rather quiet ride back home.
A few days later and we returned to the city to see Jake off on a private jet his employer owns. They had the whole plane to themselves. It was a lovely experience and a look into what’s ahead. So, this week was filled with the past and the present and the future. That’s a lot to take in, but we managed.