Memorial to Tanya Burr, 1981-2002

Headstone Details - Part Two

The following paragraphs deal with the various details of the headstone in sequence from the top:

1.    As I wandered around the cemetery looking at the other graves, I noticed that almost all were headed with the words "In Loving Memory of". So I sought out any alternatives and settled on the much rarer "With Love We Remember".

2.    I always wanted to mention the baby on the headstone and as I had known since the funeral director told me, that the baby was a boy (the autopsy report confirmed that), we had chosen the name Brendan the night before the funeral, as I wanted it to be named before its burial. This was to have been Tanya's name had she been a boy, so she knew it. It seemed like a nice choice under the circumstances. Then, when Emma visited a psychic some months later (just before sentencing), the psychic came up with the same name for the baby. Emma didn't know we'd given the baby this name and it hadn't been publicised, so Anita got a huge shock when Emma told her what the psychic had said. The psychic had known that it was Tanya who Emma was wanting to know about. I hope some of the other things Emma was told were also correct. It was a little uncanny though.

3.    Deciding how to describe the relatives of Tanya was hard. In the end I settled on Kieran and myself as Tanya's immediate family, as we were who she grew up with. Any extras would have meant excluding people Tanya was very close to, in favour of others who were not part of her life. So to accommodate all, they became "Family & Friends". However, as Tanya's closest friend for ten years, I included Anita's name as she also wished, with "4EVA" symbolising their constant text messaging. 

I am completely confident that Tanya would have fully approved of this arrangement - especially as I paid the balance of the headstone's cost, after significant and enormously  appreciated contributions from NZ Women's Weekly (for the story they published) and Andersons' Memorials (whom I know through our Scandinavian ancestry and a few previous historic memorials and headstones).

4.    The epitaph, which is as cryptic as I could dream up, reads: "Tragically stolen to steal her car, which soon stopped itself near Turangi. One ‘schoolhouse’ had thus found another, and a girl lies dead for his asininity." 

This covers the situation where Tanya was murdered so her killer could steal her car, and that the car then unexplainably suffered an electrical breakdown near Turangi, thereby forcing him to abandon it. He thought it ran out of petrol (after he neatly parked it at a closed service station in the dead of night), but it next started okay at the Rotorua police station without them putting any extra petrol in it. 

It then successfully drove to the nearest petrol station a kilometre away. However, it kept breaking down when restarted when hot like that increasingly for months afterwards until the problem was finally discovered (when it refused to start altogether!) and the 'computer' was replaced. It has performed faultlessly ever since.

The word 'wharekura' is Maori for 'schoolhouse', the symbolism meaning that the killer (Wharekura) had been taught a horrible lesson by the car, in that when someone steals something, in this case a car, they cannot know how healthy it is. In fact, Tanya had virtually no money (just the remains of $NZ100 I gave her on Friday to get home on) as the banks were shut most of the time she was back home and she hadn't been shopping to get any change. Furthermore, the car was by then almost out of petrol after driving from Palmerston North, via Dannevirke, and there was the aforementioned electrical fault. 

Therefore Tanya was irritrievably dead for nothing as a result of Wharekura's stupidity in taking such as extreme step just to get a faulty car. However, as 'stupidity' was a bit blunt for the required job, I chose 'asininity' instead, which means basically the same thing (i.e. ass, donkey, silly, stupid person etc.), as a more comfortable and less bluntly obvious alternative for the headstone.

So to the headstone (which includes Tanya's portrait on the upper left portion):

On the sloping part of the headstone's base is the above text. This is bordered at each end by the picture tiles - which in part serve to balance its content. This text began life as the epitaph in the one-year memorial notice in the Rotorua Daily Post, and the first three words were their suggestion as my original version was deemed a little strong!! I wanted to briefly explain what had happened to Tanya - and also to emphasise for posterity that other people contributed 'behind the scenes' to Wharekura's actions.

These are of course all the many people who didn't care enough about him during his younger life to keep him out of strife, and also those who could have actually prevented what happened in various ways in the last days before the murder, but who quite happily got on with their own lives and did nothing to assist him as he went off the deep end. This includes the two government institutions who came in contact with him in the two days before Tanya's death. I am quite sure those people are now happily getting on with their lifes, having completely forgotten Tanya.

Similarly, other occupants at the Hilda Street flats must take the blame for the roles they played in Tanya's death. These most especially include the people who invited Wharekura to stay with them on the Saturday morning, and then had abruptly vanished the same day to Auckland for reasons that were not really quite 'that' urgent (a sick elderly relative facing heart surgery the day after Tanya's death), given the invitation they had just made. 

Tanya also died three metres from a young guy watching TV in the neighbouring flat, who was aware of what she said to Wharekura in her last moments, but who didn't make the effort to investigate - although it was probably too late to save her life within seconds of the words she spoke anyway. 

Meanwhile Tanya's own flatmate was hiding from her in Huntly after trashing the flat while Tanya was overseas. The flatmate routinely knocked at the door after work in the evenings to get Tanya to unbolt it due to Tanya's long-standing security concerns. So this is who Tanya expected to find on the other side of the door when instead she found Wharekura.

It is possible to consider Wharekura solely responsible for his own actions - but a lot of failures combined to lead to this result. I would like to think that placing my wishes (and they would certainly also be Tanya's wishes!!!!) in granite, might in some way impact on the consciouses of these people - although I somehow doubt it.

It has not been being too busy doing other things that caused the delay in uploading the details of the headstone onto this website. I also will never regret the wording on the headstone. As just explained, everything was very carefully thought through. 

There was also no 'official' unveiling of the headstone. Kieran and I simply tidied the newly installed headstone last December and reinstalled the flowers etc. together. It was our own personal time with Tanya who was the third member of our own little family of three.

These are copies of the proofs of the two picture tiles. They are probably about the size of the actual tiles, and although the text is small, it is sufficient to be readable by someone who bends down to look. The upper tile, which had some very minor text corrections since these proofs were made, shows scenes from Tanya's holiday, with the cats pictured just after Tanya's death - especially Puff curled up on the matching armchair at our home to the one Tanya had at her flat. The lower tile shows the things Tanya loved.

The (corrected) text reads: "Left to right: Norway-Sweden border 20 August 2002; New Friends in Rome 1 September 2002; Place de L'Alma (Diana Memorial Site) Paris 8 September 2002; Grieving cats 26 September 2002"

This tile is the same as it appears on the headstone. It shows (upper) Tanya's car parked at the cemetery beside her grave a few weeks after her death, albeit that the photo has been reversed; the picture Kieran coloured in for Tanya and gave her three nights before her death. (lower) Phoebe sitting on Tanya's former little dining table in our conservatory (with the washing hanging in the glasshouse in the distance!), and Puff looking down from the roof of our conservatory (with the cloudy grey sky behind him), in early 2004.