Note: This essay contains mentions of suicide that readers may find distressing.
The last time I went horse-riding with my teenage daughter, Victoria, was during the holidays before her final school year. Before I found out she agonised over exams and not being one of the “cool kids”. Before she ended it all.
That summer was still a time of innocence. I believed Victoria was happy, that she knew she was loved. I had no idea.
School and our jobs were in Singapore, but as New Zealanders, we would fly back every summer. We had a cottage in the South Island on the coast near Ōamaru where my husband, Malcolm, grew up.
It was so rural, at night the only light we’d see was from a single streetlamp marking the turn-off from a little-used main road. With little ambient light, the night skies were vividly clear. Vic would stand outside with Malcolm and they would look up, pointing out together the Southern Cross, the Plough, Venus, and Mars, tracing patterns of galaxies with their fingers.
I would be inside, bustling about, drying dishes, annoyed at how long it took to wipe them clean with a tea-towel, wishing we had a dishwasher.
During the day, when not at the beach, Vic and I would go horse-riding at the farm of my friend, Shirley, near Palmerston. Shirley, who was in her sixties, seemed to be one of those tough old birds that rural life throws up. I knew her to be a woman of remarkably wide-ranging roles and history: the daughter of a sheep farmer and who later became a sheep farmer’s wife, mother of two grown kids with him, riding instructor, horse breeder, lover of books of all genres, first-aid and veterinary expert, amateur painter, former hunting groom in the UK, American civil war historian, one-time resident of Hawaii with her first husband, bereaved mother of a baby there lost to cot-death.
I liked how she instantly understood Victoria’s empathy with horses, and how riding in the countryside, away from the complexities of people, made my daughter feel safe. Shirley would give Vic the horses with sensitive mouths to ride, the ones that needed a lightness of touch. With me, Shirley somehow had immediately seen the lack of being mothered in my own childhood, how I overcompensated for that with an idealised outpouring of love for my daughter. Shirley would put me on the horses that liked to take charge, were competent in managing all that life threw at them. She knew they would take care of me, and that I flourished in that environment.
That day, Shirley put me up on her mare Tess, whose once grey coat had turned white with age, but who still retained the elegant beauty of the beribboned champion hack she once was.
It was sunny but windy when we turned up for the last ride of the holidays. At the farmhouse, Shirley invited us into the kitchen where she was cutting apples for the horses. A pot of lamb-neck stew cooked at a slow, steady boil on the stove, thickening the air with fatty render. In the living room, a fire stirred in the grate, although it was summer. Binder twine was strung across it, and on that, a pair of men’s blue overalls hung, drying. Two pīwakawaka sat alongside the trousers, chirping indignantly as Vic and I drew near.
“Aren’t fantails bad luck to have inside?” I called out, anxiously. There was a snort from the kitchen. “They’re just birds,” Shirley replied, pragmatically, giving us apple slices to tuck into our pockets. At the back doorway, she paused to adjust her neatly-pressed jeans, put on gumboots, and clip back a lock of once-red, now grey hair. I was conscious of our too-smart boots and jodhpurs, hardly worn.
The horses were already bridled and saddled at the yards. Vic and I looked at each other, or at least, I thought she looked at me, thinking what I was thinking. We appreciated how organised Shirley was but missed getting to know the horses by fussing around, putting their gear on ourselves. I guess Shirley thought we might put it on the wrong way, coming from apartment living in Asia and not used to handling stock on a working farm. Sensing Vic’s disappointment, I patted her on the shoulder, reassuring her, “We’ll get to brush them when we get back.” She shrugged me off. “You’re always saying too much,” she said. I felt rebuffed. I was just trying to show I understood.
It has been over a decade now since Vic took her own life, yet that last ride haunts me, what it signified, and how I could have changed things.
Despite all my ruminations about whys and what-ifs, it is the beauty of the landscape I return to most, though. The glistening crops of oats ready for harvest, the dramatic peak of Puketapu—a mountain sacred to local Māori—rising at the back of nearby Palmerston, a rural service town famous for its mutton pies. The mountain is a perfect conical shape towering above rolling hills. I see it even now, yet I can’t recall the contours of Victoria’s face that day. Her face is in shadow as she sits atop a chestnut mare called Hannah, and the sun is behind them. Hannah has her head down, chomping at grass. We are half-way through our farm ride, having a break in the far-most field on the edge of an estuary at the back of Matakaea, the headland marking Shag Point. The sluggish waters of Little Muddy Creek meet here in a confluence with the moody Shag River, prone to flooding. They become one with the sea that washes in and out, tamed by a sandbar that breaks the swell, creating an in-between breathing space for nesting pohowera, or dotterels; ocean-weary penguins and seals, world-weary humans.
Shirley looks up at the clouds gathering from further south behind Puketapu. She is checking the weather, which can change quickly here; raises the head of her horse from the grass, says to Vic and me, “Let’s go for another canter.” The horses understand her and swing around of their own accord. We are off straight into a gallop, me tugging at the reins to slow Tess. The speed frightens me. I call out to the others, “Wait!” Shirley and Vic each turn to look at me, laughing, the wind blasting the smiles hard against their faces. Neither of them has any care about danger. “C’mon Mum, let go,” Vic yells. But I don’t. I see horses falling, breaking their legs, horses bucking, horses getting tangled in fence wire, bolting across the main road, horses flinging up stones behind them that blind me, horses mutilated by a sheet of iron hurled by the wind. The list is endless. When I open my eyes, the others are a long way in front. Tess, not as fit as the others, is breathing hard. Yet she is tossing her head, wanting me to loosen the reins and let her go.
I catch up, resisting the urge to say, “Hey, that was a bit fast, guys.” Shirley and Vic are sharing peppermints. They don’t offer me any.
For Vic, galloping at the estuary was a window of time away from the uncertain future of teenage-hood, of “growing up”. The speed, the connection with a horse, and this invitation into a human-animal partnership in nature swept away thoughts of anything else. Swept away, temporarily, what I see now as the decision Vic had made before the holidays, that on her return to Singapore she would take life.
For me, galloping was frightening. A horse could trip and fall. The sea lions might attack. The pohowera, with their nests on the sandbar’s shingle exposed to the weather and predators, pained me with their vulnerability. Impermanence and unease permeated the air.
On our return to the stockyards, Vic turns noticeably quiet. Methodically, mechanically, she removes Hannah’s saddle and puts it away. She avoids my glance, but goes to Tess, her favourite, and places a gloved hand on the mare’s whiskered face. Tess nuzzles her affectionately. Vic rests her head on the mare’s neck. Both human and animal heave a deep sigh. They stay like that for ages.
It hits me that Vic is not merely anxious about the year ahead, but absolutely dreading it, with school ending, and then what? We’ve discussed options; she’d thought of doing a course on being a counsellor in Dunedin, about an hour away from Shirley’s farm. But she worries she won’t fit into the student culture that she has seen on social media; the ritual burning of sofas outside rundown shared houses, the all-night parties.
Her sadness reminds me too much of my own directionless teenage years. Ineffectually, I tap her shoulder, false-cheerily saying not to worry, everything will be all right. Shirley then steps up, gives Vic a big hug, and tells her that Aunty Shirley is here, and if Victoria does end up studying in Dunedin and wants a cuddle and to feel at home, to just come up anytime, she will always be welcome.
When we get back to Kākaunui, Vic refuses to take off her long, leather riding boots. She throws herself on the ground, shrieking, rolling around, crushing the lavender plants we’d planted for her 17th birthday a week ago. She kicks out like an untamed horse.
I’ve never seen Vic behave this way. It frightens me.
All at once, she goes limp and distant. I rush to her. She looks so pale. I stroke her hair, telling her everything is all right. Her eyes flicker. She chokes back something. There’s a tear. She sits up and becomes “normal” Vic—the good girl—and we pull off the boots, and I put it at the back of my mind and wonder what to cook for dinner.
About two years after we lost Vic, Malcolm and I were sitting in a waiting room for an appointment with a counsellor. I was flicking through a psychology journal when I came across an article about psychotic episodes in teens with attention deficit disorder, which Vic had. It triggered the memory of Vic and the riding boots.
It occurred to me Vic was reverting to infancy. When she was a baby, before she learnt to turn over on her tummy, she had this habit of fighting her helplessness by kicking her legs repeatedly until she got our attention. I think that after the horse ride, when we got home, Vic was overwhelmed by the return of her inner voice of suicide ideation, telling her that life was too difficult, leaving it was her only option. Yet, riding at the estuary, that voice had briefly been pushed away. She’d given herself over to the reckless danger of a long gallop across farmland, partly because that death wish made her deliberately careless—and then found herself energised and alive and capable.
The act of removing her riding boots when we got back represented a return to her decision to end it all. She realised, she did not really want to die. Or at least, wanted more happy moments. But it was too late. A large part of her had become obsessed by the decision to die, the course of action it required, and she was unable to break free of that.
The kicking was a reversion to babyhood, a desperate reaching to get our attention, to tell us of the suffering she could not articulate, and begging us to help her.
For the first time since Victoria died, I’ve gone back to Shirley’s farm. I’ve brought Vic’s riding clothes along for the ride. Her helmet, cream jodhpurs, and long black boots are on the passenger seat next to me. It gives me continuity, I suppose. Or perhaps I seek the delusion that Vic is somehow still with me, that we are back to normal, going in the car to the farm.
Shirley is older and more tired than when we saw her that summer. Life has changed for her, too. Her husband, Bruce, has kidney failure. The once towering mountain of a man who ran his sheep and cropping farm with authority, is a slumped figure in his huge recliner chair. Shirley has to take him several times a week for dialysis in the city. The farm may have to be sold.
In the kitchen, a packet of instant rice sits on the bench. No meaty stew simmers in a pot. Shirley hugs me and says, “Vic loved you, you know.”
I don’t know. I am not sure of anything now.
No men’s trousers are hanging to dry. The grate has only cold remains of a half-burnt log. There are no birds flitting about inside. Shirley leans on me for support, suddenly dizzy. “My heart,” she says, and reaches for a pill from her pocket.
At the yards, I do the tacking up. Saddles are now too heavy for Shirley to lift. I am riding the chestnut mare, Hannah, the last horse that Vic ever rode. It has been a dry autumn, and the old mare has lost weight.
Unusually, Shirley says she doesn’t feel well enough to ride. She’ll give me a short lesson in the schooling ring in the flat paddock by the creek, adds that in any case, “You’re not up to riding across farmland on your own, not in your state.” She’s right. I might burst into tears at any moment. My emotions are all over the place, as is my body, weighty and bloated. In my grief-stricken state, my once-upright posture has folded, I am wobbly and floppy. I’ve lost my core. I’ve lost my flexibility. The reins keep slipping through my stiff fingers.
I try and rise to the trot. The ground passes below too quickly. I bounce when I should sit. Mercifully, Hannah is in a docile mood, as if resigned to a day of being a school horse. She is unlike the confident, wild creature she was when Vic rode her that last ride. Back then, she had tossed her head the entire time, wanting to gallop. Until the estuary, Vic had sat patiently, letting the mare fidget, not wanting to rein her in; wanting to go faster, too, but perhaps mindful of Mum preferring a slower pace.
Finally, I get the one-two rhythm of the trot. Hannah carries me along amiably enough, tolerating my jerky feet, the way I grab her mane when I become unbalanced and topple. Shirley is in the middle of our circle, resting on a mounting block. She watches us carefully, making constant corrections: “Sit up,” “Give a little with the inside rein,” “Yes, better. Keep up that pace.” Eventually, she becomes impatient. “C’mon, you are on a good horse, for god-sake. Relax a bit.” She sighs, and declares, “Get ready to canter, put your outside leg back, inside hand on, ask her.” I am terrified. I don’t want to go faster. In fact, I don’t want to be on a horse at all. I want to be in the comfort of my car, in the driver’s seat, going nowhere in particular, listening to the radio.
Hannah flicks her ears back, waiting for my command. She is happy to obey Shirley’s will, even if I am not, and probably understands everything Shirley says, in any case. For the sake of the horse, I try and focus on balance, co-ordination, and correct applications of the leg and hand aids. I sit still and deep, preparing to ask for an increase in stride. Hannah, who has already heard Shirley say “canter”, ignores me and falls into the quicker tempo of her own accord. The sudden speed shocks me. I throw the reins away and grasp the long mane. I’m back in childhood at the Easter Show, on a merry-go-round as my mother looks on and doesn’t seem to see that it is going too fast and that I am screaming, not laughing. Out of nowhere, comes another memory: She does see the ride is going too fast, she does see I am screaming. And she does nothing.
I open my mouth to scream here, too, but Shirley calmly says, “Take back the reins. Sit up. Hannah will look after you.” And indeed, Hannah does. The mare gives a soft wicker as her head nods in time to the stride, as if to tell me everything is fine, she knows what she is doing, my job is to just to stay on. And so, I do. We keep cantering on the circle, and I begin to hear things outside my overthinking, anxious self: the lazy roar of a plane making its way along the coast, the bleating of sheep. I become aware again of Shirley’s flow of guidance: “Heels down,” and then, “Passable.” Well, we’ve cantered, and I hadn’t expected to manage that. Any minute now, she will tell me to go back to a trot. But for the first time in years, I feel rebellious.
I canter out of the circle and keep going down the side of the paddock, towards the track to the estuary. Just for the hell of it.
Shirley yells, “Pull the right rein, hard.” But I call back: “I’m okay.” I lean forward and give the horse her head. Hannah squeals, gives a small buck, and leaps into a hard gallop. I am with her, easy with the drumming pace, laughing. Ducks in a pond rise in alarm as we hurtle past. Branches scrape my legs. We fly through a half-open gate, wiggling at just the right moment, not changing our pace for even one beat. At the estuary, we surprise a sea lion snoozing on the sand. It lumbers, outraged, to the tide edge. I lift my hand, as if to say “Hi!” A rein falls loose, flopping uselessly on Hannah’s neck, but I pick it up, no problem. She dips her head and shies only slightly at the sea lion, although I sense she wants to do a gigantic leap sideways. She is, after all, a horse. Gives a half-buck to remind me.
“You’re the boss,” I tell her, happily, and she turns away from the water. I don’t want to go back to the farm, to its forced adjustments to the rhythm of the seasons, the predictable way life is planted in the earth, and so distant from the moon and the sun.
But the mare has turned for home and flattens her ears, as if this will make her go faster. I take a huge breath—and find myself sobbing into red tendrils of mane. I’m shuddering, and yet I’m conscious of the heat of the day and the piping alarm of pied stilts in the shallow margins as I flash by. I don’t even notice going back through the half-open gate, can’t remember evading branches. I am crying and yet part of me has come loose and is laughing, too. I’m on a bolting horse out of control. All I can do is hang on. And it is exhilarating.
When I look up, we are back at the farm, leaving a trail of rising dust along the gravel driveway. Shirley is still at the mounting block, idly flicking her through her phone, not even glancing up. Hannah gallops right up to her and halts, sides heaving, coat in a muck-sweat. Shirley smiles, pats her, and leans forward. The two of them seem to have a quick conversation, as if they had planned all this together.
I am adjusting my seat after having nearly fallen off at the sudden halt. I put a foot back in the stirrup I’d lost, and sit up, dazed. Around me, the farmhouse, sheds, fences, and livestock look sharp and clear, as if I have regained my focus. Still, as I wipe the tears from my face, a little part of me worries that Shirley will tell me off.
But Shirley is matter of fact as she puts her phone away and reaches to hold the reins. “You needed that,” is all she says.
Helplines (New Zealand)