Goodbye Darling Edmund

          The wind took the rose petals from her fingers and whipped them away out of her sight.  In her mind, she saw them land on the foam crested waves, “Goodbye darling Edmund” she whispered, and the wind took her words as swiftly as it had taken the roses and tossed them on to the sea.

          This was the place they had laid her little brother to rest in March as they had rounded North Cape, his tiny lifeless body cold and still, had been slipped into the glittering ocean in the late afternoon, her parents clutching each other at the ship’s rail, joined in grief.

          Eliza had been planning this goodbye since her mother’s letter had arrived in April, telling her the new baby had come and they’d named her Mary.  She said Edmund had died of the croup on the voyage home, and they had let him go at the place where the Pacific Ocean meets the Tasman Sea.

          Eliza was 14 and no stranger to grief, having spent most of her early life in the Goldfields of Victoria as her father hunted an elusive golden fortune, and where more than one of her siblings were born and buried, but the death of her beloved Edmund caught her in the heart much harder than the others.

The sea, the deep blue sea hath one,
he lays where peals lay deep,
he was the love of all,
yet none over his grave may weep.

Edmund Charles Tye
1856-1865

SHIPPING INTELLIGENCE. New Zealander, Volume XXII, Issue 2387, 25 March 1865