When our family moved to New Zealand in January 2012, Give It Heaps was merely a blog, intended to be a way to keep in touch with friends and family across the globe, a place to report on a new life in Aotearoa – the stunning views, our endless creative endeavours, the toddler growing up barefoot in Utopia. It was all that for a few years. Long enough to establish a business, build a house, get a puppy, settle into another world quite the opposite of the one we left behind in New York City.
Eventually the blog evolved, or devolved, into an intimate journal intended to keep friends and family informed in the final months and days of Aaron’s life. The archive can be read via the link below. (Dear reader: the old blog format reads backwards, 2018 - 2012. Might I suggest scrolling back in time a bit?)
22 October 2022
Out the studio window, sunny Devonport. The seaside village where we started. Max, now thirteen, is at school preparing for camp next week. Uma and I walked along the waterfront on our way to the studio, planning to head to the beach for lunch. This morning I’ve been reading and editing Ho Spice’s annual appeal letter – cobbled together from interviews, speeches and words I’ve written about Aaron’s life and death.
When we moved here in January 2012, Give It Heaps was just a blog, intended to simply be a way to keep in touch with friends and family, a place to share our new life in New Zealand – the stunning views, our endless creative endeavors, the toddler barefoot in Utopia. It was all that for a few years. Long enough to establish a business, build a house, get a puppy, settle into another world quite the opposite of the one we left behind in New York City.
The woodgrained sign above the door of my new studio, a miniature of our old studio on the same block, reads Give It Heaps. Although the name of the company we started together, it was also an unintentional mantra. Kiwi slang, I can hear Aaron say it now, ‘Give it heaps girl!’. It was the way we lived our 16 years together. Pushing life at a pace mystifying to most, a pace that made perfect sense to us. We lived with urgency I’m so thankful for, an urgency which has ground its way into my bones. ‘Give it Heaps Max!’, I yell after our boy as he heads out the door.
Weeks after his funeral, a friend sat on our deck and shared a story about her miscarriage. She told me the baby was not removed from her womb once it died because her body absorbed it. Consoling me through grief she said, “Mickey, Aaron is not gone from this world because he has been absorbed. Absorbed by you, Absorbed by his son. Absorbed by his friends and family, absorbed by everyone who loved him. He lives on inside of you.”
For years I’ve struggled to write a simple introduction to this book* perhaps because it represents THE END. Although the blog has sat dormant since Aaron died nearly five years ago, we have not. Max has grown to be taller than Dada, Uma has turned grey, I have married once more. I still panic about how I will ever preserve his life, his music, design, words and pictures, his laugh, warmth, the essence of who he was – I want to wrap it up with a neat bow for Max to unpack and discover when he is ready.
A futile and impossible task, perhaps this is as close as I will ever get. But it does not matter because Aaron is not going anywhere. He is somewhere with Cameron and Tony playing music, he is at school helping Max put up a tent and he is right here with me in the studio listening to the birds, feeling the breeze come off the sea.
*The Give It Heaps blog will be published as a book for Max in 2025.