Random Cam Photos

When AB was 18 months Cam was living with us for a few months.  These are during that time.

Cam was SO sick the week Angus was born.  This was 4 weeks later.

I could never get sick of seeing this photo

My Eulogy for Cambo

It's been too hard to write anything on the blog lately.  Cam went to live with Jesus last Friday at 12:38pm.  We celebrated his life today at a memorial service.

Cam my brother – part man, part cowboy.

As many 12 year olds in Albany did, Cam slept with a .22 rifle beside his bed. It wasn’t a good morning for the free range rooster who crowed too early one Saturday. He flicked open his window and hit it with the first shot, returned the rifle to its position and lay back down in bed.

In reminiscence, our childhood was quite idyllic. On the farm hand raising orphaned lambs, underage driving, running through orchards, tinkering with motorbikes, Cam learnt jazz drumming on upturned Milo tins, and we had a plethora of adventurous dreams that the 80’s TV offered us. Didn’t everyone want to live with Bo and Luke Duke in Hazzard County?

His thirst for adventure began there and carried him around the world multiple times….always chasing the thrill – not of the next adventure but - of the next connection. He loved it. Finding new people to talk to, making new friendships and catching up with old ones.

When he and Carmel came to visit me in Kazakhstan they got stranded in a corrugated iron airport for days on end. In the 3 days they were grounded, Cam learnt Russian from the Mafia as he played cards and ate Mars Bars with them. In airports, queues at concerts, camp grounds & cafes he met people.

You met him! Did he make you feel like you were more interesting that anyone else? Did he ask you questions beyond what was polite and superficial? Did he make you feel like you could play guitar or drums or sing or anything better than him? Did he teach you stuff that he loved and now you love it too? Did he make you feel incredible and amazing?

Cam’s life legacy will most strongly be remembered by how he communicated with people. Desiring to change the shape of people’s hurts and insecurities with words - talking, teaching, blogging, writing, praising, and singing.

He was also a bit of a cowboy. Apart from his fetish for every checked shirt the op shops could offer him, he was a bit unconventional. He always had dreams in his head to live unconstrained by non-essentials like walls, beds and IKEA furniture.

New standard for being sick
Through his blog I think Cam became one of the most famous sick people. He has set a new standard for being sick. You would be a brave person to put your hand up and say you could do a better job of being terminally ill. Try reading his blog post titled “It’s so unfair” in July 2007 not long after being diagnosed. He goes on and on about all the favour and blessing in his life that he felt was without justification. He considered himself “profoundly looked after” and “completely bombarded by everything that is good” by God who he felt owed him no favour. He lists the comforts of “a warm bed, a fridge bursting with food, a warm jacket for the winter and air-conditioning for the summer” as comforts of privilege. His comfort was so unfair compared to the majority of the world’s population. Even 3 weeks ago when I reminded him of this blog he agreed again his life was ridiculously unfair in all its blessings to him.

In other blogs he questions the financial costs of keeping him alive. He lived ecologically. He was thoughtfully aware of the costs and impacts of himself in the world.

Flick through the pages of his blog when you need a dose of him. Blog posts for blood results titled “Plasma Funky Music White Boy”, for radiology regimes “I’ve got UV under my skin”, “I’ll feel a lot better tomarrow” for stem cell transplants and “Roid to Recovery” for Steroids Day. A spectacular patient with humour leaking out of every word.

Humour
Five days before he died we realised that we’d lost him neurologically. He was misfiring with thoughts and conversation and was hard to understand and he needed a wheelchair to get around. He and Ash wanted to go to Riverview Church that night and he tackled the request with the nurse

“We were hoping to go AWOL tonight so I’ll need 20 milligrams of [some drug] to take with me”
“Oh, ok. I’ll just have to check that with another nurse. I don’t usually work on this ward”
“Oh, in that case, give me 25 milligrams!”
She giggled said “I’ll check your charts anyway to see what you’re due”.
“Oh, in that case – I’ll just need 15.  But I guess we’re going to church so…. make it 10!”

Funny, witty, respectful and polite to the very end. His humour was the last thing to go.

Dark days
Being chronically ill without reprieve for years on end is mostly not funny at all. Cam’s distress and torment is chronicled by himself in his public and private writings. There were multitudes of us walking beside but the effect that a looming death has over your life must be lonely and traumatic regardless of the close company. He had periods of dark desperation and deep disappointment….most significantly the breakdown of his marriage to Elizabeth. His regrets were great and he was hoping heaven would have some answers to his complicated questions. Libsy gave him and us all a decade of devotion and a demonstration of other-worldly grace.

Cam’s relationship to God was always present and often a wrestle. He was never content with simplistic pat answers. Plenty of people who endure ‘unfair’ circumstances walk away from inefficient beliefs. Cam submitted to transformation.

Gobsmacked
Who would’ve thought that Cam’s scenario would end with a story and person like Ashley? It was a gobsmacked kinda love where neither one could believe their romantic luck. I’ve told Ash I feel like she’s already completed her greatest life work at the age of 25. Cam’s fear of being alone was never realised and her hand was in his long after the end. We treasure her with us as a Harris.

At 37 he grieved the shortness of his opportunity to do more in his lifetime; to leave a greater legacy, to achieve more dreams, to write more songs, to buy more cars and to see the demise of the AFL! I think if he had been given 80 years he still would’ve been unsatisfied with corners of the earth not yet touched.

In recent times we tried to persuade his thinking to know the length and depth and breadth of his impact on people’s lives and the awesome legacy alive in our hearts. I think last Friday, just after lunchtime, it was revealed to him.