William "Bill" Anthony Carius

Thank you for your message - I was really shocked & saddened to read she had passed away and wanted to let you all know I am thinking of you all.

I feel both shock and a deep sadness – I had hoped I would see her for one last time, certainly to come over and support you all – but I was not sure ...not sure of anything really...you can understand my ambivalent feelings - though you and probably the rest of the family are in shock, as am I, we all recognise the difficult relationships we had experienced with our mother in our up-bringing. Those relationships for each and every one of us were different, and transmuted over time. Some of us were at once ‘the chosen’ and at others ‘the damned’ – we lived in the spiritually barren and emotionally barbed world of conditional love. You and I remember the storms that raged within that house – we all weathered them – the constant storm.

We all were aware of her own personal struggles and demons which she wrestled with for most of her life - a struggle which most of us were witness to and at times the victims of. I have no idea where her struggles started or from where they came – perhaps there is some truth in generationally inherited behaviours – and perhaps some of her displacement could be sourced in part from her history with her own mother – some of these behaviours seemed to play out again with our mother’s own first daughter, our sister, [edited] – I have great respect for my eldest sister in this regard – [edited] suffered the first storms...whilst I was very young [edited]was my protector for that I will be forever grateful and hold the greatest affection – being as we were exposed to those strange happenings of 1965 – we somehow got through them together. If you need a starting time for the cracks in our mother’s world I suspect it started here - Wanganui 1965...I do not know exactly what happened – you have some clues in the documentation you managed to salvage from the old Department of Social Welfare – for which we have copies, our history – I thank you for that much, knowing your history is a powerful thing.

Our mother was a deeply troubled person – you know this already, we all lived in the same crazy dynamic that was our family – I call it the psychic car crash that was our home.

I hope she left this world with all or some of you around her to send her off on her new journey – I know, if there is such as a thing as heaven, that her Dad, Mother, and great-Aunt Maude will be there to greet her and guide her – I hope too that with the lifting of her burden she will attain her spiritual lightness and be finally set free – to fly.

It might be that there will be those who judge me, or even all of us as a group, as being unworthy as “children’ of our mother – well, let them, but only if they experience what I personally endured for 17 years or what [edited], you or [edited]endured, then let them find the words to judge – in that we; certainly me, have shown limited interest in her whilst she was a live. If anyone is guilty of this the most it is me – I carry this gladly – for we know the truth and it endures. Our mother had moments of lucidity where reason prevailed and she could be very charming, innocent, child-like –but when the black veil dropped over her she could be unpredictable, irrational and well, crazy... I do not know if I have ever admitted this to you, or {edited] particularly, I was terrified of our mother – she did her very best to psychically attack us all, undermining our sense of self-worth, we were never good enough or we were ‘just like our father’ – which was rather ironic since most of us didn’t really know what he was like – apart from being told he was ‘no good’.

I commend both you, [edited] level of compassion and familial solidarity during this very sad and difficult time. There is a sadness – but overall I always wished my mother no ill and thought of her with great compassion – the sadness is that I never got to say goodbye, to tell her she did the best she could do with what she was given – and in a strange way I am thankful for that much – we would not be who we are, we would not have odd doors opened for us if it weren’t for our mother unlocking doors in the sky.