DAVE GORRIE

If we are lucky, very lucky, we get the chance to share our lives with someone that helps us grow into what we can be. I was really lucky. I met and fell in love with my wife, Salah. Together, we raised our family and from her I learned many things. Things I could never have learned from anyone else. I learned about the blending of cultures, about respect, compatibility, time, and how quickly it can go. I also learned about honesty and I came to understand stickability, determination and resilience, the sort of things we might all need to get through these earthquakes.

After our home was trashed in the September quake, Salah discovered a lump in her breast and was diagnosed with cancer. She had an operation but between the February and June quakes it returned. It had become very aggressive and the prognosis was not great at all. Then June came and our home was smashed once more. 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 shingles and shit up to here. No power, no sewer. Trying to cover the cracks in the wall of our lounge with tapa cloth to make the place more pleasant for her, it was just the pits. Salah died in November and for me… for me the earthquakes had just become a horrible background to my wife’s death. The December quake, what was that? Just a blip to me.

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 the road cones and the flowers that I’ve put there because today is the 22nd 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, 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… 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 realize 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 would be like soiling all our memories, wouldn’t it?