Remembering Alison Louise Metcalfe

 

Born 23 April 1932, died 13 September 2022 in Dunedin NZ

These word were given by Alison’s remaining children (Scott, Andrew and Greg Metcalfe) at her funeral service on 20 September 2022.

Follow this link for a YouTube playlist of a slide show remembering Alison, a recording of the service and the final music she went out to (Highland Cathedral).

How do you describe or sum up someone like Alison?

It’s easy to start with a timeline, a history of being born, growing up, all the people and places that shaped her life, what she achieved… but it doesn’t really catch the essence of Alison. When a life has taken the journey it has into dementia, it can be easy to be influenced by how things have ended, the last 14 years or so, rather than all those before this.

So, perhaps the way to remember Alison is by her strengths, how she responded to an (at times) difficult life, managing to thrive with ingenuity and making the most of at times meagre resources.

Alison was a depression era child and learnt from an early age to Make Do and care for others.

She was born the second child and first daughter of Corrie Freeman and Doris Armit at Redroofs Maternity Home in Dunedin in 1932. Alison was part of a working-class family who had few possessions but were proud, faithful Christians, valuing hard work and education. They had a Brethren background, but eventually were very involved in Roslyn Baptist Church where JT Crozier was minister for many years.

Corrie was a carpenter and used to work down on the Dunedin wharves, cycling down the hill each day and pushing his bike up the hill at the end, often with a box of produce that he had picked up for a bargain (instead of buying beer or tobacco). The house they had in City Road in Roslyn was not flash, and Doris was not a natural homemaker by inclination.

Alison picked up a significant domestic load, including looking after her other siblings… but she was also taught to read at an early age (the Bible, of course!) and this included music as well. These skills became central to her life, she was always contributing to Church settings – Roslyn Baptist, Miramar Baptist, Mt Albert Baptist, Hanover Street Baptist, Anderson’s Bay Presbyterian, St Kilda Methodist and most recently Caversham Baptist. These were skills that were the last to go during her journey into dementia, often demonstrated by reading every road sign when in the car on an outing!

Her siblings (especially her two brothers) were very spirited with David (number 3 in the family) being a prankster. Alison (who tended to see less of the “joke” with these sorts of things) often being caught up in whatever was going on. Her wider family were always so important to Alison, she loved to hear about their children and will be remembered as an aunty who was always interested in what was happening with them. Her older brother, Melville died in 2022, with David dying in 1992, youngest sister Marion dying in 2020. Her sister Jean lives in Palmerston North and it is great to have her here today.

Despite a childhood that was not easy...

Alison valued education and learning… with a very practical, hands-on bent to tackling this.

After attending Kaikorai Primary School, she went on to King Edward Technical College in Stuart Street, Dunedin, and then trained as a nurse at Dunedin Hospital, graduating in 1954. After deciding to undertake further studies in obstetrics, she went to Whakatane Hospital in 1955, which included attending a newly formed Whakatane Baptist Church. There she met the Metcalfe family, including our father, Arthur.

Alison continued her studies at the Bible Training Institute (BTI) in Auckland in 1956, the same time that Arthur started at NZ Baptist Theological College to train for the Baptist Ministry. In those days there was no entertaining marriage before a trainee minister finished their course… so a long engagement ensued. In January 1960, Arthur (Dad) and Alison (Mum) were married at Roslyn Baptist in Dunedin, before heading to their first church, a brand-new venture in Glen Eden, Auckland, with 15 members, a church hall and rickety old house for a manse set in an orchard.

What followed was a time of Mum being part of…

Building a family, ministry, music and hospitality.

In Auckland, a rapidly growing suburb in the middle of the baby boom meant three children also born into the Manse (Scott, me and Jenny), shifting existing buildings over the road to a new site, continual church extensions while coping with people who wanted to attend by pitching large tents to hold services before buildings were completed.

Mum had always been good at making clothes (for years a variety of sewing machines were put to good use for herself and the whānau) but cooking was not her forté, nor Dad’s. Mum’s mother-in-law, Margaret (Jean) Metcalfe helped teach her the basics, and hospitality was very much a part of life at Glen Eden as well as other churches that followed (Miramar in Wellington and Mt Albert in Auckland). Mum described times in Mt Albert where a minimum of 12 people were at the dinner table at least three times a week, with many people (often with complex life histories and needs) staying in the manse guest room in all the churches they worked in. Mum was a charming vivacious hostess, bringing out the best tableware and making everyone feel welcome at weekly Sunday dinners as a special occasion…

She was very involved in all aspects of Church life, including supporting Baptist Missionaries (something she continued when her own resources were meagre) and actively playing the piano and organ at church services. The pipe organ (after earlier playing electronic versions) became a passion later in life: for many years she went to organ lessons in Dunedin at St Paul’s Cathedral: she loved going to the odd Evensong and organ performance at St Paul’s. Mum was well known as a competent sight-reading musician. Singing – usually alto, harmonising and improvising – was a part of being in the pews at church. She also sang in choirs such as the Scholar Cantorum - Dunedin City Choir, and other church-based choirs.

Hers was a life of service that had significant challenges and difficulties. You could say that Mum was …

Tested in Life and Faith on many fronts.

An early testing time was when Jenny was born in 1965, with the family advised to put Jenny into institutionalised care (as was then viewed as best practice for a child  born with Down Syndrome). Mum and Dad brought Jenny home to the Glen Eden manse with initial support of Dad’s parents, figuring that Jenny was better to have the love of a family, rather than institutional life. We are so grateful for our parents making this decision that was ahead of that time, and acknowledging other children were not so fortunate. Jenny was lovable, loved, and loving, being “special” in the best sense of that word.

But it was not plain sailing for anyone, primarily for Mum, who lived with and cared for Jenny for almost 45 years… and it didn’t get easier when the family shifted to Wellington in 1965, with fourth child, Carey (born in 1967) catching bacterial meningitis at 11 months and becoming critically ill. Mum’s mother, Doris came up to lend a hand, but travelled on the ill-fated Wahine, which went down at the entrance to Wellington harbour. Grandma survived, but after four months Carey died… which put an enormous strain on the family who were expected to keep up church commitments with variable support and understanding. The youngest child, brother Greg, was born in 1969 and completed the Metcalfe whānau.

A shift to a new church in Auckland at the start of 1974 saw another home (this time a renovated villa with a section that needed Mum to break in)… a busy church, but with congregational undercurrents starting to show, and cracks in the relationship between  Dad and Mum that ended in a separation early in 1976, when the children were aged 15, 13, 10 and 5. This resulted in Mum becoming homeless and eventually returning to Dunedin, with the younger family members Andrew, Jenny and Greg. Scott moved to Wellington at Dad’s prompting, who had become a prison chaplain at Mt Crawford.

This was an incredibly hard move for Mum, and for us as well. From being in a church--provided house and with a pivotal role in ministry, 1976-7 saw five different living places, moving the young family around Auckland and then onto Dunedin, starting in a tiny flat under her mother’s home in City Road. The family situation must have been seen as serious enough for Mum to be given the keys to a brand-new Housing Corporation home in Mulford Street, Concord… and yet it was another place barely finished, lacking insultation, floor coverings, curtains and possessing a clay-like section that went from bog to concrete in quick succession, with faulty plumbing forming a covert lake of grey waste water under the house, which was why the house was unreasonably damp and cold until it got sorted. Mum set to with her typical determination, breaking in the section (with some help from friends at Hanover Street Baptist), laying carpet tiles and vinyl flooring offcuts, making curtains… all the time trying to cope with being a solo parent with two young children and a teenager on very limited income.

Despite all this, Mum continued to remain generous and hospitable, always caring for the needs of others first with a determination to just get on with it all… making good use of a strong, stubborn streak in her family genes. Dunedin was the place where her mother Doris, beloved Aunty Jean and other family members lived, and being close to them was an important part of life, especially as some came to the end of their days. Mum did Karitane Nurse training in the mid-1970s and was thinking about a return to the paid workforce, but she decided that her family came first, and she wanted to care for them.

It's something that all of us children have been very mindful of: the sacrifices she made for us, and we have tried to help out over the years in many ways… but through thrift and determination, Mum moved into her own home in March 1990 with Jenny, living here for over 23 years until she sadly needed dementia care from January 2014.

Mum was someone who had an active retirement.

She was a great walker, and even as dementia set in, she was able to race up flights of stairs faster than many a fraction of her age, often walking for miles in her St Kilda – St Clair neighbourhoods. She continued to welcome loved family and grandchildren to visit, which would often involve excursions in the great outdoors in the Dunedin area, as well as art galleries and museums. She continued to play the organ for various faith communities until she settled in Caversham Baptist. She would always dress beautifully (she loved to look good – but always on a budget) and kept her home meticulously clean.

Mum never had a lot of possessions, making do with what she had and at times, recovering lounge suites and renovating household items to keep them going. Family pictures sometimes show one particular cane--sided lounge suite which had around three upholstery reincarnations in its lifetime of over 50 years… and the suite remained in her home at Victoria Road after this was sold. Mum was terrible with technology, especially in later years when TV remote controls defeated her: she never used an ATM, a computer, or mobile phone. The opposite to Dad who used to push the boundaries with gadgets, including keeping in touch with her by radio telephone when out and about doing his church work.

Diagnosed formally with dementia at the end of 2008, the family kept a closer eye on her (and Jenny, who was still at home), with Jenny moving into supported accommodation in 2009 and then hospital level care until her death in 2012. Prior to this, Mum’s wider travel excursions were always connected with whānau: after her first overseas visit to Australia in the early 1970s, she visited Greg in London in 1997 and Tokyo in 2001, going as far as Scotland in the latter visit to spend time with Andrew. In 1991, a highlight for Mum was travelling to Minneapolis-St Paul in the USA, to support Jenny as a talented gymnast winning several events  in the International Special Olympics. In November 2004, Mum travelled to Hawaii to celebrate Greg and Mayumi’s wedding. Mum’s last overseas visit was in 2006 to visit Greg and Mayumi and Mayumi’s family in Japan.

Mum was someone who was never idle (again, a family characteristic), with her days including completing the ODT crossword with her sister Marion (by phone), looking after her house and garden, singing in the Schola Cantorum - Dunedin City Choir, corresponding with many friends and relatives, reading and watching TV, and always actively attending church.

As her world started to get smaller and life became more of a struggle, Mum was a very reluctant recipient of support packages, remaining fiercely independent and (somewhat unsuccessfully) trying to convince everyone she was OK. She resisted – but eventually enjoyed – the services of the Gibson Day Unit at Dunedin Hospital, a similar pattern emerging when she went to Thornbury House in 2014. This did give a new lease of life – we realised how lonely and isolated she had become, and this gave her a whole host of new friends… and (for a while) being the ‘Queen Bee’ as the most cognitively intact person there to start with. She had rejected the notion of taking any of her beloved sheet music with her, but Thornbury discovered that she could still belt out tunes on the piano, which she did much to the enjoyment of others. One of the staff there called her “chuckles” due to her tendency to respond to what was going on around her with laughter – a bit different to how some of us remember a sometimes serious and intense person, but many of the old inhibitions had started to loosen.

The then manager said that at times when Mum sidled into her office on the pretense of some idle chatter, she’d eye up some boxes of chocolate on a top shelf in the room and enquire if she could possibly have one or two?!  Her sweet tooth was something that never left her…

And so to the final journey…

Mum’s last home was at St Andrew’s Home and Hospital, Dunedin, where she went in February 2016, following a dip in her health that saw her no longer able to walk and needing hospital -level care. Although dementia continued to take its course, she continued to interact with people (… including those appearing on the TV!) and enjoying singing and music: mum was still able to sing along with videos of favourite hymns on her TV until the past few years. She loved having visitors, especially younger people and children.

Mum has defied us all: at times when we thought she may be moving into the last stages of life, she has rallied, calling on all the strength of her long-life family genes. It has been hard for us, her family, to see her gradual decline and the loss of so many things that were important to her. But, along with many others who have been on this kind of journey with loved ones, we know that she still lives on. Not just because of her strong Christian faith and knowledge that she continues to be held in God’s love, even in death, but a part of her in all her brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchild, who she has loved, given herself so generously to, consoled and forgiven: her life and faith have become part of who we all are.

A comment she made when talking about going on a series of challenging overnight tramps with Hanover Street friends in 2003, said that for her :

“The best part of these tramps was the isolation and withdrawing from “society” and enjoying having no radio, TV, telephone or other mod cons and appreciating having lots of fun and fellowship as we walked and talked. I’m so glad to have had these good times…”

Graham Fawcett, one of the (then) younger people who came into Mum’s orbit when she was at Hanover Street Baptist, sent the follow recollection which sums up Mum:

“One memory I have of your mum - at one of the many Sunday lunches I was invited to I mentioned an organ piece I’d liked - I can’t remember the name - some famous musicians fugue or some such… Well, she asked the ‘official’ church organist if it might be ok to play that particular piece one Sunday before the service began, and boy did she play it. Her feet were going every which way but loose. It’s the things that she did that often go unnoticed that made so many people feel special. I know that her memory (deserted) her (in later years)…but there are many people who will remember her for a long time”

Mum, you were and are a thankful, clever, gentle, caring, grateful, loyal person of love and music who worked hard to make your world a better place, and succeeded.

Rest in peace Alison, safe in the arms of Christ who you loved and who continues to love you…