Natural protection that was

It must’ve been a lot more dramatic today, what with the effects of ex-Tropical Cyclone Dovi lashing the country, and it hit Auckland hard, too. I originally shared the Instagram version of the photo above as part of a blog post five years ago today, though the photo above is the uncropped version. In my caption, I said, “I was running an errand, but glad I stopped for a photo.” The “errand” I mentioned was that Nigel and I were in Clark’s Beach to do a pre-settlement walk-through of the house we’d bought, something I didn’t talk about publicly until after we moved.

The reason I didn’t talk about it from the start, and why I avoided many specifics when I did, was that I wanted to protect Nigel. He was a Group Manager for Auckland Council, which was a senior level. I knew that some people hated Auckland Council and the people who worked for it, and his department, Customer Services, was one most people dealt with at some time or other. He’d told me a (very) little about the abuse his staff got over the phone or in person, and I’d helped him draft calm, matter-of-fact responses to aggressively abusive people who’d written to the CEO. I also knew that, while still fairly small, the number of people who’d been trespassed from Council offices had increased. And, I knew there were people whose bizarre anger at Council was beginning to reach dangerous levels, endangering the health and safety of both staff and the general public.

Nigel never talked very much about any of that, but I knew (not the least because sometimes people’s awful behaviour made the news). He didn’t complain about much of anything, actually, and seldom talked about work stuff, mainly because he preferred to leave work at work or in working hours. But he also knew I’d worry about him if I knew how truly awful some people were behaving. Still, you can’t share your life and love with someone for so long without sensing things.

So, I tried to keep our home a place of refuge. That’s why I never tried to talk him out of buying any of his toys. He told me once, “as long as I can buy my toys, I’m happy”. The context of that was that he was talking about how his career/life driver wasn’t about getting an ever higher salary, but I saw instantly that it was also about what made him happy—not money itself, or even his “toys”, but about the happy experiences those “toys” brought him. Judging by all the “toys” he left behind, he must’ve been pretty happy!

The other thing I did was that I avoided talking publicly about our life with too many specifics, especially places. In those years, I was blogging and podcasting (and, for a time, making YouTube videos). All of those things were public and I knew being too open created risk, for both of us. To be clear, it was probably more likely that a satellite would fall out if the sky and land directly on us than that any violence-prone person would find Nigel through the stuff I was posting, but it also wasn’t impossible, especially if I wasn’t careful. I would never knowingly do anything to put him at risk, no matter how incomprehensibly small that risk might be. It’s just standard procedure when you love someone deeply.

Nigel did plenty to look out for me, too, of course—and I didn’t know about most of that any more than he knew the extent to which I was protecting him. After all, part of protecting a loved one means not being obvious that you’re protecting them. It’s just what you do.

So, that photo above, snapped on windy day five years ago, had a huge hidden back story, only some of which I’d eventually talk about publicly while Nigel was alive. I no longer have to protect him, of course, but now I can talk about who he really was, the amazing man I spent so much energy trying to protect, and why I would. I—we—could never have done otherwise.

This is a revised and expanded version of something I posted to my personal Facebook earlier today.