Tragic end to troubled journey
Tragic end to troubled journey
By HAYLEY GALE - The Nelson Mail
Last updated 12:00 04/04/2009
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Farewell: A family photo of Natasha Graham in 2006.
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The Golden Bay family of dying Romanian-born teenager Natasha Graham find strength and hope where others might see only despair.
Jonquil and Bryan Graham come across as a solid, loving couple, with the sort of strength that lets them find the positive in everything. Even now, as they grapple with what Jonquil calls "the worst possible trauma I have ever had in my life".
Their sprawling old homestead in Upper Takaka has seen more than its share of dramas and traumas over the years, as the Grahams have raised nine adopted children and fostered a tribe of others, several of them born in distant lands and abandoned as babies before being rescued by the Kiwi couple.
But past challenges are paling into insignificance now as one of those children, 19-year-old Natasha, lies in a bed in Golden Bay's community hospital in Takaka, close to death.
"The situation is not the miracle we were all praying for," Jonquil says. But still, she finds encouragement where most would see only despair.
"Maybe the miracle is that we had a very special daughter who touched everyone's lives, but now maybe she has finished her work on Earth and has to move on."
The miracle she was hoping for was that Natasha would pull through from the injuries she suffered in a freakish accident in the Wood in Nelson late on Thursday, March 19.
The Grahams understand that she tripped over a bicycle while crossing Weka St and stumbled backwards into the path of a car. Natasha was apparently with a group of other young people at the time - she was living a transient life in the city with her twin sister Joanna, after escaping the quiet life in Golden Bay.
Late that night, the phone rang at the Graham home in Upper Takaka. Bryan describes it as every parent's worst nightmare. The voice on the other end told them their daughter was in Nelson Hospital's intensive care unit.
As it soon emerged, ICU could do little for Natasha. Doctors judged her injuries life-ending. She was removed from artificial life support but remained in Nelson Hospital for a few days. Among the more poignant moments there, a crowd gathered around her bed to officially make the unconscious girl a Maori Warden, acknowledging an ambition she had harboured and worked towards.
Then, on Monday this week, she was taken back to Takaka to die. Quite when that will be, nobody can be sure. At the time of writing, she was still breathing unsupported and attached to a saline drip. From there, nature will take its course.
"It could be days or weeks," Jonquil says. "Natasha is there in body, but she is really gone."
Jonquil is "all cried out". But still, she looks for the joy and the positive.
Life with Natasha and Joanna has not been easy. They were Romanian orphans, two of the numerous abandoned babies whose plight gained international exposure in the early 1990s as evidence of the cruelty and hollowness of the Ceausescu regime in its final years of tyranny.
The Grahams adopted three Romanian orphans (the third was Cristina, a year younger than the twins, and the youngest of all the family), along with two from Russia. But back in tranquil Golden Bay, problems emerged as the children grew up.
As Bryan explains, the couple experienced a big difference between the children they had adopted at birth and those who had been severely neglected as babies, who they took on later.
He says mental health professionals have described the condition as a reactive attachment disorder in children who do not have a close bond with a mother in infancy. They can go on to develop behavioural problems, and find it difficult to return the love given by their adoptive parents.
"The children we did not have from birth became the most problematic in childhood and adolescence," he says - problems such as being "light-fingered" and difficult at school. The couple had to lock their bedroom to protect their belongings.
The children were well known around Takaka, not always for the right reasons - petty crime, truancy and the like.
Bryan says Golden Bay became too small for Natasha and Joanna, who preferred the wider mix of people in Nelson and wanted to find their own way in life.
Numerous cruel coincidences and twists can be found in the leadup to Natasha's accident. Chief among them was her mother's certainty that the young woman was turning her life around - evidenced by her enthusiasm for the work of Nelson's Maori Wardens and her determination to join their ranks and work with other youngsters on the city's streets.
"Everyone says she would have made a fantastic Maori Warden. She has a lovely, bubbly, effervescent personality. She loved being with people, and she touched so many people. She had friends from all walks of life."
Then there was the twins' sudden high-profile media exposure. First, TV3's current affairs programme 60 Minutes screened an item about their journey from squalid Romanian orphanage to idyllic Golden Bay, their tearaway ways and their experiences living on the streets in Nelson. The Listener followed up with a story on the attachment disorder Bryan speaks of, highlighting the Grahams' experiences.
But surely the bitterest pill is that Jonquil and Bryan had a fresh hope for their Romanian-born daughters: a journey back to Romania to try to retrace their birth families. Jonquil was in the midst of writing a book about their experiences bringing up their adopted children, a follow-up to How Many Planes to Get Me?, published three years ago.
The visit was to provide the final chapter. "I never thought it would be about us having to bury our daughter."
For now, there is little appetite in the Graham family to make the trip anyway. Joanna has been hit hard by her identical twin's accident, and is distraught. Bryan predicts that her "naturally highly sociable" quality will be her strength and will help her to cope with her loss.
He says the Grahams all get on "amazingly well as a family".
"I've seen some families that squabble seriously. Well, it's not like that with us."
All but two of their children have left Golden Bay, but Jonquil says: "We always feel bonded to the kids and they feel bonded to us."
However cruelly life has treated the family in the past few weeks, Jonquil and Bryan say that looking back, there is nothing they would have changed.
"When we started out, we had this big, old historic house with 10 acres. There always seemed room for one more child," Jonquil says.
"Each and every one of them is a priceless gift, and I am extremely grateful to the mothers who gave birth to them. They've all got different, strong personalities. The blend of kids we've got from different parts of the world make up this family, and I would rather have had all these adopted children than ever had my own,"
Even with the notorious reputation the twins may have gained in some eyes, "we could not have done anything different", she says.
"They're free spirits who love being with people. There might have been some behaviour that might raise other people's eyebrows, but we've never given up on them. They always know where home is."
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