Saying goodbye to my uncle
Memories of a thoughtful, generous and kind man
On Sunday - the 8th May - we’ll be farewelling my uncle, David Hodge. He passed away on Friday and if you’ll forgive me for the departure from our usual topics, I’d like to share with you some of my favourite memories of him.
The 8th of May will be exactly a year since my grandmother’s 90th birthday party. I was in charge of making the slideshow. When we arrived at the venue, David saw me and said “oh thank goodness you’re here” - they’d been trying to get the projector to work without me and hadn’t been having much success. The lead-up to the party had been a bit stressful, but just having him say he was glad I was there (even if it was because of technical troubles) made me feel better.1
My grandma’s birthday party was a talent show at her request, featuring my various talented family members - my grandma has six kids, has sixteen grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren, so there was certainly a pool of people to call upon. Three of my cousins performed songs, my aunt and her parents performed a traditional Samoan dance, me and two of my uncles gave speeches2, and David performed ‘What A Wonderful World’ on the saxophone. He was not known as a saxophone player - we knew he’d recently taken it up and had been getting lessons, so we waited in nervous anticipation - what would we do if it was terrible? Someone could pretend to faint perhaps? Knock over the punch bowl? He introduced himself and shared with everyone that he had only recently taken it up and this was his first public performance, so to please be kind to him. And yet, our nervousness was for nothing - he played a very recognisable and by all means good rendition of the Louis Armstrong classic. Later in the evening, I overheard him saying goodnight to my grandmother - and she noted how very good he had been on the saxophone, perhaps much better than she had expected. He quietly said to her “the trick is to set expectations low, so I could really blow everyone away” and winked. He’d known he was going to be good the whole time but wanted to give my grandma (and everyone else) the extra joy of being wow-ed by it.
He was always more thoughtful than you might have given him credit for. Grandma’s birthday reminded me of a similar time when I was 18 - me and my boyfriend at the time were staying in Auckland to go to Laneway Festival, and we went round to his house for dinner. David put some background music on and after about 10 seconds, my boyfriend said “OH! THIS IS BEACH HOUSE! Beach House will be at Laneway tomorrow!”. David's reply was suspiciously nonchalant, “oh, yeah they will be…”, but I knew from the very pleased look on his face that this has been a set-up my boyfriend had fallen for hook, line and sinker. It was January 2011 - David must have gone out of his way to check who was playing at Laneway, and either happened to already own a Beach House album or had bought one via iTunes (this was the pre-Spotify days). He then chatted with my boyfriend about Beach House and what other bands were playing. This small moment had clearly taken some planning, and I remember my boyfriend raving about it afterwards - my uncle was officially cool.
That was the summer I finished high school - cue the peak awkwardness at well-meaning adults making small talk about what you are doing now, how did your exams go, again and again. The difference with David was that he wasn’t just asking for the sake of it - he was genuinely interested. He was a school principal so he knew how NCEA worked and lived in that world. I remember telling him I was dux, I could see how proud he was and it meant more knowing that he truly understood what it had meant to achieve that. As a young person, having someone who earnestly took an interest in what you were doing was a big deal - not to mention that he could translate to other adults who maybe didn’t understand NCEA so well. He saved me and many of my cousins from well-meaning but boring conversations about why you needed x amount of credits to pass the year or what NCEA with merit or excellence actually meant - having an ally to parent-splain for you was such a relief at our large family Christmases3.
That Christmas he bought me a huge hardcover book - Mastering Digital Photography by Michael Freeman. I still have it, it’s nearly 700 pages. I had been doing photography at school, had sold a photograph of mine to be on the front cover of a NY Times best-selling author’s new book, and was going on to study media at university. It was things like that - where he went out of his way to show support for what I was doing - which really made him so special to me. I remember him telling me that he thought I was really good at photography, and that praise was like golddust. But it wasn’t only when I was at school or university, he was also a subscriber to this newsletter. When I ran for council in 2019, him and my aunt bought some of my tee shirts for them and my two cousins. He has four kids of his own, and four great-grandchildren, and yet still found time for me.
Even when I was a kid, his gift-giving was still top-notch - me and my younger brother had grown up with a hand-me-down copy of Monopoly which had only the shoe left and no rules whatsoever (imagine two small children trying to work out what “pay dividends” means on a chance card) - this was the only board game we had. The year that we had otherwise gotten a bag of pick-and-mix from our dad for Christmas, at my mum’s Christmas, David bought us ✨Guess Who✨. This was like, the most luxurious gift I could have imagined as a 10-year-old - it was a board game WITH THE RULES OF HOW TO PLAY! It had ALL THE PIECES! No one had drawn on it! No one had broken anything! I didn’t even care that I had to share it with my brother - it was something NEW! And COOL! And FUN! Pretty much any gift that year was going to beat a handful of winegums, minties, and those horrible banana lollies, but this was a gift that would get me and my brother to play more nicely (not one of our best skills, if I’m honest). My mum, my brother and I had been living in a campground over winter, so this game made my childhood feel like it had a bit more dignity - we had nice things like other kids did.
He was always so generous, and especially with his time. I rang him up countless times over the years to ask him questions, things like “do you know how schools pay for their electricity”, and other odd scenarios that intersected between what I was doing and his work. I was re-reading the texts I have from him, in October he said to me “Been keeping an eye on the Waikato vaccination rates, I’m sure it’s been keeping you on your toes!”. I had dinner with him before New Years, and we spent a lot of it talking about my work in the COVID response programme and making jokes that my cousin (in her final year of school) would make a great nurse. The last time I saw him, a week before he passed, he wanted to talk to me about someone I was working with that he knew - and I wanted to stop him and say, this isn’t important, but even in our final conversation, he was still giving me advice and supporting me with my job.
Just like for my grandma’s birthday - I am also the photo-wrangler for David’s funeral and I was looking at what I could find online since he had done a lot of interviews over his time as a principal. I found an interview with him talking about Tamaki College, it must have been somewhere around 2006-2007 ish judging by the old-school CRT monitors in some of the shots. He talks about changes he made as principal (investing in those CRT monitors!) and that they had a saying at the school, “I can is far more important than IQ”. In another article where he’s quoted, they talk about how when he started at Tamaki College in 1998, there were only 21 students in the seventh form4 and not one went on to university, but in 2004, there were 47 seventh-formers, and more than 80 per cent of them were headed for tertiary study. I doubt any principal is beloved by every single student5 - a particularly hard ask of David, who was also principal of Rangitoto College which is the largest school in the country - but what amazes me is seeing the uncle I knew reflected back in the stories of how he talked about the schools he led. Emphasising believing in people and giving them the tools to succeed - whether that be computers, access to qualifications, or positive attitudes at school, or encouragement, love, and support if you were his family.
While I know that he is no longer suffering now he has passed, I am tremendously sad that the period of my life which featured his unwavering love and support is over. I am so grateful to have had him for 29 years of my life, but also feel that cancer is so cruel to have taken someone our family loved so much, who could have had so much longer. He was the person I had mentally tagged that if I ever got married, I would ask to be the MC at my wedding - because he could roast my family just the right amount but I would have fully trusted to not say anything too embarrassing, the talent of a great public speaker (or school principal I guess). I go forward without him, thinking of him every time I listen to Beach House, knowing he will have been proud of everything else I‘ll achieve in my life, and that his love was felt by so many people - not just by me.
And to be fair, even myself and my partner struggled to get the projector to work. It was very temperamental.
It was my 2-year-old cousin’s talent to begin clapping off my uncles when he was bored of their speeches (which was truly so funny).
No offence to my other family members.
Seventh form is the equivalent of year 13 btw.
Although the comments and shares on the Facebook post from his last school, Saint Kentigern College, makes me think he probably was.