On my mother's mother's side, there are medical people. They're intriguing for both their smarts and their grit, forged through the experience of bog Irish immigrants to Aotearoa. Many have made careers in medicine. The Murphy medical gene skipped me spectacularly, but I'd like to think a little of their moxie found me.
There was my great uncle Bill. He died long ago, and as far as I know I never met him - but I sat down to dinner late last year with his granddaughter and son-in-law.
Bill rose to the heights: a Deputy Director General of Health, and part of the 1970s commission that set up ACC, the landmark Accident Compensation Corporation. But he is said to have been incredibly humble. He only became a doctor because of an incident sometime in his twenties. He was working for the family business in Winton, Southland, doing a delivery in the truck. As he unloaded, a group of Otago medical students jeered him, this nobody young guy with his shirt sleeves rolled up for work. It must have brought out an underdog impulse, some kind of rankling impetus for fairness, because Bill decided he’d become one of them. First, he had to go back to school, to obtain qualifications in the Latin he was hopeless at. He persisted. The rest is history.
I knew my Nana for my first twelve years. She read to me, and when I was old enough, I found things at her house to read to myself. She was Bill’s sister, and a gifted paediatric nurse, although chronic illness curtailed her vocation, left her housebound for much of her adult life.
I remember her telling me how she thought, although it was more than that. It was how she faced the world. That word, vocation, meant something different then, and something profound to her. It described both her Catholic faith and her nursing. Both were a calling. I’m not even sure that ‘calling’ is the right way to understand it: a call is a thing you may choose not to answer, or even pretend you didn’t hear. For my Nana, vocation was something over which a person called has little say. You do it because you know, in the marrow of your bones, that it is right. Because it is right, you have no option. You don’t have to like it: you have not been promised an easy ride. That’s not how right and wrong works. When a thing is right, you get on with it.
On the news, the hospital staff had been made to kneel. They were stripped to their underwear, humiliated, hunched bodies forced into rows in some kind of courtyard under an unrelenting sun. The IDF soldiers patrolled them, guns pointed at heads bowed, hands trembling, voices pleading. They, the ones kneeling, would have known this day was coming, but they persisted anyway.
I thought about what vocation means for a person who is called to humaneness: what it is know the consequence of your calling and somehow find the courage to follow it anyway.
I thought about my whakapapa and the ones I love.
I'm not even seeing this 'on the news'. It's so sanitised we have to hunt for the 'real' stories.
Beautifully put. I love your writing.