Today in this world a good man is dying. He is not famous and when he does take his last breath, no media outlets will report the loss. Like many men in their mid-thirties, the Good Man is a father, a husband and a friend. He is loyal to his mates, and pretty much as honest as they come. He is not the sort to want me, or anyone else to list his achievements or attempt to use rhetoric to make the ordinary seem extraordinary, and so I won’t. Nor will I dwell on the fact that we will once again lose someone far too young far too soon, because that just seems to be a growing aspect of our world. I won’t focus on the scourge that is ‘the C word’ and its random and ruthless attacks, nor will I use this as an opportunity to remind others of the importance of maintaining a ‘healthy lifestyle’ because let’s be honest, that is no protection against the cruelty of fate.
What I will do is attempt, in my own awkward way, to thank the Good Man for what he has given those around him, perhaps without even knowing he has done so.
I am told that the diagnosis of a serious illness can often prompt people to seek a different lifestyle and with that an alternative means of income. Perhaps those test results, those moments in a sterile doctor’s office is the impetus to do something you never really had the courage to do in the past, or always figured there was still time to do. When he discovered he was ill the Good Man left his job teaching at a local High School and began doing something he had always loved – using his hands to build, to create. He had already built his family home (I mean really build, not the Jewish version, in which “We’re building a house” actually means, “We’ve hired an overpriced architect to design us an obnoxiously large family home – just imagine Tuscan villa meets ‘The Jetsons’ -, and we keep calling our equally overpriced contractor changing our minds about what we want where”), and he began to share his talent.
The Good Man built our back room – the place my children go to play and have parties, to hang out with their friends. This is the room that sees them use their imagination. It is in there that my youngest son paints his random and colourful canvases and it is there that he and his sister often go to create buildings and worlds of their own, granted on a slightly smaller scale. My eldest son uses the room as a space of solace and escape from his two younger and often noisier siblings. My husband exercises in that room – an attempt to reclaim physical and mental health. The space is often referred to as “The Room the Good Man Built”, and whenever Hubby and I consider knocking the entire house down to build a slightly larger, more practical home for ourselves and our three children, our throats catch, for we know it would me the demolition of “The Room the Good Man Built” and the part of himself man puts into everything he creates – not something either of us are prepared to do.
The Good Man built my parent’s deck, a place that is now the site of family barbeques and meals. It is a space we now often gather and a place that allows my mother – now also suffering with ‘the C word’ – to sit and enjoy her newly landscaped garden – something the Good Man also had a hand in. I know this space brings my parents peace – something they have not actually been all that good at finding throughout their lives. My father sits out there and feeds his birds, content to commune with a few small members of Australia’s wildlife. My mother sits at the table, with a mug of coffee or tea, reading a trashy magazine and for a moment at least manages to forget all she has to call me and complain about – something I am truly grateful for.
The Good Man built a pizza oven in his backyard. He called us together and we ate too much, drank too much and laughed far too hard for a group of friends who had recently found out one of their own was now at the mercy of the limited power of medicine. Then he built another oven in the back garden of a mutual friend. Once again, we came together to eat, drink and laugh. To live.
Then it was our turn. Right next to “The Room the Good Man Built” stands a pizza oven which has provided warmth, heat and light as well as mouth-wateringly good homemade pizzas which our families and friends have all shared. Everything tastes better when you’ve had a hand in it. Fresh pizza, hot from the oven was the food of choice at my daughter’s third birthday party last year, as well as at my father’s birthday dinner this year and friends will gather around it in less than a week, when we see in the New Year together.
The Good Man has fixed odds and ends for friends of ours and for people across Melbourne I have never met and will probably never know. When I get angry and frustrated over what has befallen the Good Man and his family I attempt to find consolation in the fact that years from now, after we’re all gone, there will hopefully still be a part of the Good Man dotted all over Melbourne. He will be in a mended fence or step, in a deck and a garden bed, in a back room and a house, and in a series of pizza ovens that will hopefully continue to bring families and friends together to eat and drink, laugh and live.
