A recent case of a box containing human ashes turning up on a Christchurch beach failed to find the person through the official channels, www.dia.govt.nz, but did show up on A Memory Tree.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/press-communities/5122535/Human-ashes-mystery-solved

All deaths that are published in NZ daily papers are recorded on www.amemorytree.co.nz and the friendly freely available searches include all name variations. In a nut shell, if it’s published, we record it.

That includes favoured names, nee names, former names, even nick names.

We’re pleased to be able to have helped the NZ Police when all other official channels failed!

These past few days have been the hardest for me personally and professionally.

On 4^th September there was a 7.1 earthquake in my home city of Christchurch. The quake struck just after 4.30am and I had four kids in the house. Like a mother-hen I gathered them together and we fled for our garage spending the remaining dark hours in nooks and crannies there.

Long story short, after thousands of aftershocks (yes, thousands!) we, like everyone else in the city, survived. It was nothing short of miraculous.

Our home has not been so fortunate but everything that was lost and broken can be repaired or replaced.

Later that day, on the other side of the South Island, nine innocent lives were lost when a skydving plane crashed on take-off at Fox Glacier. A month later five cyclists died in as many days. My heart broke when we created a page for a young mother and her unborn child lost in a car accident.

Then last week, back on the West Coast, the Pike River Coal Mine claimed 29 lives when a series of explosions occurred 2km underground.

International media flocked to report on the miners plight and we witnessed those in charge having to make some excruiatingly difficult choices to hold back rescue efforts as the mine remained unstable with high levels of toxic gases.

I wondered what I would have done just a few months earlier, during the big quake, had any of my children been trapped in a situation that was life threatening for me to save them. I feel certain I would have thrown myself into a fire to save anyone of them if even there was the smallest chance they were alive. So I can only imagine the pain and anger that the grieving families feel for the loss of their loved ones – the fathers, brothers, sons and uncles – who they may never be able to recover from the depths of the mine now.

How can all the families cope with such sudden and unexpected losses?

Some will argue that skydiving and coal mining are dangerous things to do and come with inherent risks. But that doesnt quite cut it for me. These losses are huge and it seems the West Coast has had more than its fair share of tragedy.

Then last weekend I went to the funeral of a friend who died after a long and courageous battle with cancer. He was only 47. We’d met almost 30 years ago and, while not close friends, we’ve been in touch over the years through other friends. He leaves behind two small children and a beautiful, strong and wonderful wife.

It struck me how grossly unfair losing someone is, whether it’s unexpected or not, and that we are faced with our own mortality and our loved ones everyday. But then, at my friends funeral, the Reverend officiating poetically put things in such a way that reminded me that it’s not about what we’ve lost, its what we’ve had and what we’ve got to give now that matters. It was uplifting and motivating and I wanted to share it.

For the fatherless children, some too young to ever really know their fathers, we have a duty to remember their Dad, to share the stories we have, to write down our memories and, most importantly, not avoid the families because we dont know what to say.

Even though they may, for some time, reject our offers for a visit, outing or catch-up, dont give up or disppear from their lives, they have already lost too much.

Keep in touch, and the time will come when they will say “Yes”

These past few months, even though I have all the excuses in the world, has given me a big shake up. I am not a good friend, I’m hopeless at keeping in touch as I get consumed in work and family and work … and family …… and ……

I know I need to re-evaluate my priorities and not lose sight of the big picture …… life as we know it is finite, so best get on and live it well!

Site creator and managing director, Sue Skeet, says that giving is the essence of site and to be able to gift its 100,000^th page for others to record their memories, messages and condolences is a significant milestone not only for her personally but also the wider community.

“It’s really important for us to provide a place where it costs nothing to leave a message of support or share a fond memory and the site has been developed to ensure access for all is possible.

“At any time we have over 2,000 pages active with hundreds of messages and virtual flowers being left on them every day.

Death may be an uncomfortable subject for many but Sue says providing an online service seems to be helping a huge number of people.

Since launching last January, the site achieves up to 30,000 visitors each month from over 80 countries and it offers the most comprehensive list of deaths in the country, drawing together death information published in over 20 newspapers. Over 75% of their pages have activity on them.

“It’s a very humbling experience to be able to provide the forum for so many people to use to remember, celebrate and share their memories,” Sue added.

As well as the bereaved Sue says, genealogists and lawyers are finding site useful to locate people, particularly lawyers when it comes to managing their Will records. Given the demand, A Memory Tree has developed a death notification service to help certain business groups such as the legal, accounting and insurance industries indentify their clients.

“Responsible businesses are fast accepting that timely notification of a clients death helps them not only undertake whatever legal responsibilities they may have and remove the person from their mailing lists, but also acknowledge the passing. It’s very powerful, as customers are once again being recognized as people not just a client number in a huge database.

“While that seems like an old fashioned value in today’s fast- paced world, it is one that customers, and their survivors, want to find in business. Coupled with hearing from the community and their friends from all over the world, it’s very powerful.

“ I feel we’re doing our bit to help bring the human face back and that feels really good.” she added.

A Memory Tree creates and gifts Remembrance Pages for all its listings. The pages are open to the community for 21 days, after which they are archived but available for future or ongoing messages. Sue reports that many use the pages to have final conversations with the deceased, remember special moments spent together, make tribute to a friend, mark an anniversary or special family occasion, and connect with old friends and distant relatives.

The most popular features on the Remembrance Pages are the refresh flowers and light candle options with over two million being refreshed and lit. Complete published death records date back to 2006.

The Shirley Man by John Laurenson.

I believe strongly that the key to the continued development of our school lies in our ability to maintain the development of a positive culture, based firmly upon what we know as The Shirley Man.

The Shirley Man has its roots in The Good Man project, a joint venture by a number of schools, including Shirley Boys High School, which began after 2000 under the leadership of Celia Lashlie.

At the centre of The Good Man project was the conviction that a school which focuses solely on subject curriculum, could not prepare a young man for success in life.

This paper attempts to outline some of the vital aspects of personal development that a young man needs, but will only be delivered if parents and school work together to ensure that it is made available for young men.

The list that follows is not exhaustive, it is not meant to be, but it will outline a good deal of what is important and needed.

So what does a young man need? A serious response to that question might include the following:

• The ability to create good and positive relationships with people from all walks of life and from all ages.
• The ability to absorb and use language that expresses a wide range of emotions and feelings.
• The ability to know where one stands as far as belief and opinion is concerned, and to justify that stance.
• The ability of an individual to control emotion and impulse and to recognise that love, and sex are not necessarily the same thing.
• The ability to be practical which includes everything from the ability to manage finances, through to such as changing a tyre, painting, changing a tap washer and so on.
• The ability to treat others with respect and to be polite at all times.
• The ability to accept responsibility.
• The ability to be resilient and deal with grief and loss.

Let’s look at some of the above in greater detail.

Relationships.

I am now dealing with an increasing number of young men who are caught in the soulless electronic world of Twitter, Bebo, Facebook, SMS and MMS.

Frankly in such a world a young man’s ability to relate to other human beings is compromised. Real people get angry, they laugh and they cry, they eat too much, or too little, they get flatulence and acne and wrinkles, sometimes all at the same time!

In the electronic world, things are far more sanitised, and problems can be resolved by hitting the “delete” button

People need to be taught that in the real world problems occur, they cannot be avoided and they cannot be ignored, they have to be faced.

Language.

Boys do not naturally have a lexicon of words that enables them to articulate feeling, verbally or in print; they have to be taught these in an environment where it is acceptable to share thoughts and feelings with others.

Boys also need to deal with unvoiced communication and to read body language and sense mood, to interpret the unspoken feelings of others. These are things that the electronic world cannot deal with at all and so a boy is left with only a monosyllabic grunt or a raised middle finger, as tools able to be used when they try to deal with the outside world.

Know Yourself.

Students eventually have to take ownership of what they believe in and in the fullness of time they will be required to stand up and be counted for their beliefs.

The worrying thing that I often see is an attitude best summed up by Yeats when he said….

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity”

It is passing strange to me that young people are willing to progress through life without a cause, or conviction.

The best environments insist that boys think deeply about their beliefs and then also are able to voice them.

Emotion.

The Western World is so dominated by the need to sell and buy and the media con job that ensures that each happens, that quite simply we do an exceedingly poor job of preparing our young people for real life!

Today we have allowed the situation to develop in which a young person has to navigate a sexual minefield with minimal direction, except that provided by media images of sexualised ideals and questionable morality.

Where decent adult direction falters, peer and media direction prevails.

In schools, we teach the biological basics quite well but a lot more than this is required and not from the withered and tired who have absolutely no connection with young people at the very height of sexual potency.

What is needed is not more titillation, which is dangerously easy to obtain in the world where the internet is only a mouse click away.

What is required from parents and from schools is much more important and rare, specifically decent advice on what it is to be a man or a woman.

Such advice comes first from a mum and dad, but it must be reinforced by the schools as well.

Discipline.

Prisons are full of men who never mastered the ability to control emotions and to think, before they act.

Discipline needs to be taught, it is not something a person is born with, and it means training the mind and body to deny the need for instant gratification, in order to work to achieve more distant but greater and more rewarding goals.

Fight or flight behaviours exhibited by boys would have been useful in the distant past, but the usefulness of this behaviour is diminished today, far more important is the ability to seek acceptance as a mature and measured member of a modern stable forward thinking society.

Practicality.

The list of “must have skills” under this heading is very long, here are only a few.

The level of ignorance over (for example) credit card use is frightening.

There is a singular inability to understand that the artificially generated need to buy things (which are mostly unnecessary) is the underpinning reason for the latest global financial crisis and that this unchecked need will lead inevitably to another crisis and one after that and so on.

The rudiments of saving and the traps to avoid when borrowing or when getting involved in get rich quick schemes need to be shared with all of our students. We could well spend a lot of time on the Micawber (a character from Dickens) principle that clearly states that happiness occurs when one spends less, than one earns.

Etiquette.

The best bit of advice comes from a B Grade movie called “Roadhouse”

The central character, a bouncer in a rough pub said to his employees that when dealing with people the core rule was to “Be Nice” and even when dealing with rude people the rule of “Being Nice” still applied.

I don’t advise you to watch the movie, but the advice from it is perfectly reasonable, a “please” and a “thank you” go a long way in making sure a person is successful in the world of work and play, as is the ability to know what formal means and knowing the art of good respectful conversation.

Responsibility.

This is one area that Shirley is working actively in as it has begun the process of teaching leadership to all of its students. This skill set involves teaching people to make correct decisions, how to lead and in turn serve others decently and well. It involves teaching people to understand that all decisions have consequences and that the decision maker needs to accept the responsibility for the decision.

Resiliency.

Truthfully life is not a veil of tears, but it does have its share of heartache.

A student must be taught to cope, without crumpling, when things go wrong and to get on with life, even if praise is not forthcoming.

While ideally, good performance must be acknowledged, equally poor performance cannot be passed off as worthy either.

Disappointment happens, as does discouragement and thus inner courage is needed. This courage must be taught, by parent and in school.

Conclusion

I reading these notes I am conscious that a lot more could be added to the list, for example I am currently exploring whether morality can be taught. In the dark corners of all institutions, distortions of the truth occur as desire replaces a commitment to do the right thing.

My interest in morality arises from the belief that I have that, we ignore the need “to feed the soul” at our peril.

In our society we tend to the shallow, we lose meaning and we fail to recognise what is truly sacred.

In doing this we produce an environment that is toxic to the soul.

To balance this Shirley aims to provide a constant stream of examples of noble action, moving and aesthetic experiences, love, wisdom and the opportunity to engage in reflection.

In doing this we work to produce The Shirley Man, actively and in conjunction with the parent community.

Are we there yet?

The answer is no, but I sense no lessening of resolve in the school as far as working to achieve this lofty ideal is concerned.

To  realize the value of a friend or family member:

Facebook

It can not be denied that we live in an electronic age and that online services are an essential in all areas of business. Sadly, without monitoring, online remembrance type pages can be abused and cause a great of harm.

Case in point, this week a 12 year old Brisbane school boy was fatally stabbed at school. A 13 year old fellow pupil committed the crime. Within hours a Facebook page was opened and despite many genuine message left there was extremely offensive material, including child sexual abuse, bestiality and torture also posted. Police raced to close the page down, only for another to open hours later. Read story here.

It’s not the first time and won’t be the last time this kind of abuse happens and that’s why it is important to support and promote genuine sites such a www.amemorytree.co.nz who not only have public pages that the wider community can use, but also have a full monitoring system in place.

A comprehensive list of deceased and opening pages free, is one way to mitigate adhoc pages opened elsewhere and still support the growing demand for online pages to leave messages.

Quite simply, if there is a safe and dignified space for people to go to, they will go, use it and cherish it.

For Elliot Fletcher’s family and supporters, what a blow to have the memory, and thousands of genuine messages posted, spoilt by a handful of sick people.

I believe that sites such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace are not the places to remember a loved one.

They should link to bonafide sites such as A Memory Tree which helps manage how and where the wider community grieves and supports.