The story behind the story: Wrote this one while holidaying in Tumby Bay and walking past the local sea-front hospital almost everyday…

It was a dry, overcast, sea-smacked day when they took Spencer Huegold to the cemetery. The air reeked of seaweed. Later, a grey wind came in, and with it, spits of rain – visible only as dots on the red, gravelly dirt. Huegold was buried at lunchtime. Those who knew him gathered around: a small cluster of people from around town, most of whom worked at the hospital. The sun came out briefly just as everyone was placing bits of gum leaf and marigold on the coffin so that the timber glowed and crackled under its mid-summer strength.

Spencer Huegold had spent the last two weeks of his life lying in a hospital bed looking out at the street and the fluffy bits of white wave scattered on the ocean. People said the view from Spencer’s window was the best view for dying. But Spencer didn’t hear much of what they had to say. He was all taken up with the business of final goodbyes and watching the people who walked past his room outside on the sidewalk. He saw the sea breeze run through their hair; he saw the kids with skinny tanned legs ride past on scooters and bikes; he saw the town swell as tourists arrived for the summer holidays; he learnt to pick the city folk in spanking white four wheel drives, and the well-do-to country folk who wore smart polo shirts and dressed their daughters in pink, their sons in blue. Sometimes he sat in his chair and watched the horizon between the trunks of the Norfolk Island pines, watch as it blurred in the heat of midday and grew delicate after sunset.

After the heart attack, Spencer was told he hadn’t long to live. He would’ve chuckled at the fact but was too tired. He’d known it for some time – death didn’t take him by surprise, least of all his own. Visited by his daughter Jan accompanied by her five kids, Spencer was content. After eighty years learning contentment, he was almost there – further in fact, than most people get in a lifetime. All his life, Spencer had taken change in his stride. And during those last, sleepy days lying around and waiting, it was the sun he came to love the most; the sun never ceased to change things around him – the sea, the people’s faces, the shadows on the sidewalk. Bored without such change, Spencer had learnt to find it in the toil of his hard-working life; when the first rains of autumn came to scent the burnt dust of summer, when the wheat grew and ripened and the reaping began, when the harvest was complete, when the paddocks lay fallow. In this changeful life was his contentment, and in it, Spencer grew to know the God in whom he’d been fashioned after with deeper awe. Not everyone understood this awe, which was one and the same with love. Spencer’s wife had come to understand it only in the last year or so of her life. And Spencer called it a miracle – that a soul could love God, despite the dirtiness of its previous loveless state. Spencer Huegold named miracles when he saw them, and his wife’s death was a miracle. Death, Huegold said, was the beginning of a glorious completion long awaited and sought after. And the townsfolk chuckled at his depth of thought – a depth they’d never considered any farmer capable of, least of all Huegold who owned the swampy, sandy patch out the back of town and struggled to hold anything greater than a few dozen sheep, and the occasional wheat crop. But the land brought in enough for Spencer, despite the little it seemed in other people’s eyes.  

***

And so, each waning day, Spencer Huegold lay in his spanking white hospital sheets and watched the cloudless sky welcome in the growing sunshine, while all the while, his heart was weakening. One morning, the door to his room swung open and Jan walked in. At the sight of her, Huegold found himself strangely strengthened, as if for a final goodbye.    

‘G’day Jan.’

‘Hi Dad. You’re looking well this morning.’

‘I feel well – I think it’s being so close to my rest that does it,’ Spencer said with a gentle smile. Jan looked uncomfortable.

‘Righto Dad.’ 

There was a silence between them. Then Jan held out a bunch of flowers she’d brought.   

‘Brought you some marigolds. Thought you’d like them in your room.’

Huegold smiled. Jan put them in an empty glass on the dresser and sat in the chair next to the bed. Her eyes wandered to the sea outside the window.

‘Beautiful day,’ Huegold said placidly.

‘Mmmmm.’ Jan’s mind was far away. Despite the blue sea and the sun-tanned faces walking past outside, death felt close, and she dreaded its presence.   

Spencer guessed the direction of her thoughts.

‘There’re worse things than dying, luv,’ he said slowly into the quiet room.  

Jan sighed. She hadn’t her father’s faith and never realised it had been a lack in her life until now.

‘I just don’t want to be left behind, that’s all,’ Jan whispered.

‘If you only knew where I was going, you wouldn’t say that – there are no ‘behinds’ in eternity.’

Outside, the sea whooshed, and a kid ran past laughing in abandonment, and Jan realised it had been long since she last felt so care-free and light on the inside. And it slowly dawned on her that she hadn’t lived as she could have, and now it felt as if all the days behind her were lost. Like a light to her dark mind, Spencer’s words returned to her: there are no behinds in eternity. And Jan felt her sorrow lift.

***

On the first overcast day since he was put in hospital, Spencer Huegold left his pleasant sea-filled room for the unmatched joy of a perfect, never-ending life with the God whom he’d learnt to love through suffering and obedience. As the clouds came to cover his little town on earth, that which he’d been longing for, that which he’d hoped in all his life, was finally his: Spencer Huegold found himself wrapped up in the contentment of an eternity spent in the Light of life.

Sober and silent beneath the hot sun, Jan crouched with her children and tossed orange marigolds onto the coffin lid. Rising, she sensed the tentative, floundering strength of a new faith welling deep inside. She took her children by their hands and wandered over to the edge of the crowd. Beside her, an elbow gently nudged.

‘I remember your father when he was a boy – came right up to our door once and asked for a piece of string to fly his kite.’

Jan nodded and smiled politely at the shrunken old lady and managed an interested ‘Oh?’, before collecting her emotions and listening closer.

‘He was something else, your Dad. Always had such a smile on his face – my father told him if he kept on smiling like that through life, he’d do all right. And he did in the end.’ 

The stories continued – on and on they went from people in the town who’d known Huegold. Stories about his steady presence, his generosity, his simplicity. And it occurred to Jan that rather than a mournful gathering, his funeral had become something of a celebration. It seemed the finishing of Spencer’s life was greater than the beginning. Certainly the townsfolk seemed to think so. Above them, the clouds drifted in the wind and parted, allowing a searing warmth to colour the flowers on Huegold’s coffin. And under that newborn summer sun, the marigolds smiled up at the townsfolk. Because Huegold’s end was actually his own glorious beginning.