Ray Martin doesn’t believe there is life after death, but the veteran journalist has heard enough stories of spiritual encounters to make him wonder, and that includes one told by his own mother.
Mary Jane Martin was a pragmatic woman who worked long hours as a knitting mill machinist to provide for her four children after she fled Ray’s violent father.
Though Ray says “there wasn’t a lot of romance in Mum’s soul”, she had faith in something greater.
“I remember my mother telling a story of banshees when she was a child, up in country NSW,” says Ray, referring to the female spirit from Celtic folklore whose wailing portends death.
“Mum was one of 12 kids and one of the young brothers was killed. The afternoon that he went missing and they sent someone off to look for him, mum talked to me of this banshee coming up to the back fence and screaming as the sun was going down.
“Grandmother sent people off to look for her son, and in fact he was found dead beside the horse.”
He’d fallen off the animal and fatally hit his head.
Ray’s heard other confounding tales.
“I’ve done a number of stories on the ghosts of Norfolk Island. It’s an incredibly beautiful place, but because it was the most horrific penal colony they’ve got ghastly stories. One woman, a real estate agent – she gives chapter and verse the story of the ghost that she’s seen up there. Every second person on Norfolk Island has seen a ghost.”
Seventy per cent of Australians believe in some form of spirit world.
Ray has conversed with rabbis, priests and philosophers, investigating the metaphysical. He’s interviewed people who had near-death experiences “who say they do see the bright lights”.
“These are people who don’t normally imagine things,” he says. “These are people who are really straight.”
It’s enough to give Ray pause. “It’s the eternal question. What happens when you die? Yes, I do believe it’s ashes to ashes,” he says thoughtfully. “But I’m not an atheist.”
For much of his working life, Ray has been surrounded by death.
He’s been to war zones and the ruined aftermath of natural disasters. He’s charged into dangerous situations without much thought of his own mortality. He has cultivated a professional detachment necessary for surviving as a journalist.
Empathy is key to the job, he says, but “to cross the line and get involved … is playing around with your brain and your emotions or your heart and soul.”
Yet the afterlife is a concept Ray has been forced to confront lately. At 79, youthful illusions of immortality have worn away and he’s been thinking seriously about the end of life.
Statistically speaking, he has four years left.
So, Ray did what he’s often done: Created a documentary series. One that forced him to “look death in the eye”.
“If you were told tomorrow that you’ve got six months, after the shock and the tears, you’d think, how do I use these six months in the best way possible? I hadn’t really spoken about death – when obviously you should, certainly, if you get to my age. It was something that I was interested in looking at.”
For four months he probed the existential and practical questions of the great beyond. Ray explored the ecologically friendly, no-frills upright burial. He learned some people are being turned into fireworks, stones or diamond jewellery. There are Americans researching body composting, which turns a loved one into soil.
He visited a facility in Holbrook, NSW, that is home to Australia’s cryonics storage facility, where the proprietors store bodies in liquid nitrogen until such a time as the technology exists to reanimate them. (“I wasn’t tempted,” Ray says.)
He set about planning a send-off that will reflect his life, and comfort those who remain behind, when the time comes. Ray has had a few close calls over the years.
“I remember being in Beirut once, doing a story for 60 Minutes. We were going back to our hotel and the driver said, ‘Something’s happening’,” he says. “All the shopfronts down the street pulled down their shutters. It was only about one o’clock in the afternoon. Mid-week. You could hear the militia groups firing about a block away.”
The car came to a T-junction. Ray’s hotel – and relative safety – was to the right. The driver “turned left instead of right”. Ray was confused, then a “blister” of gunfire broke out.
“We’d have gone right into the middle of that,” Ray says.
He shares another story from Iran in the early 1980s when the American Embassy was under siege and three protesters stopped him.
“It had gone dark and they were burning the American flag. I thought, ‘I’m in trouble here’,” Ray says. The crowd was “seething … They were spoiling for blood. Out of nowhere came two young Australian-Iranian men. The second of the two guys took me by the arm and said, ‘Let’s go. Don’t look back’.”
He escorted Ray to his car. “Then they disappeared like angels into the night. I have no idea who they were.
“It’s only when you’re contemplating your navel, you think: Hmm, that was probably a bit close.”
He knows he can’t outrun death forever, and he isn’t scared, but he is scared to miss out. Ray doesn’t want to be separated from Dianne, his wife of more than 50 years, his children, Jenna and Luke, and grandchildren.
“I don’t want to die,” he says on The Last Goodbye. “The idea of not being around to see the experiences of my grandchildren or my daughter or my son or my wife, that’s very sad. I don’t know how people accept death. I’d prefer to be alive.”
With little choice in the matter, his philosophy is simply to wring every drop of joy out of life.
“If I was going to have a gravestone, I hope it would say, ‘He had a go’,” he says. For Ray, that means less work, more time with family.
“Every day I do something I don’t really want to do is a day I can’t spend with my grandkids or my dog,” he says. “Let’s say I live for another 10 years, that’s only 3000 days. I can’t afford to waste one of those days. I’m never going to retire but I easily say no to things now. Without being maudlin, it’s reminded me that all our lives are finite. Certainly if you reach my age, it’s getting pretty finite.”
Practically speaking, he doesn’t like the idea of being buried. Cremation is a possibility.
“I’m a country boy. My spirits lift when I go beyond the mountains, out in the open country. I said to Jenna, my daughter, I think I probably would have [my ashes] scattered out there. There’s a really spectacular sunset sometimes.”
As part of his investigation, Ray visited Manilla, NSW, where his great-great-grandmother, Kamilaroi woman Bertha, lived to the age of 104. There he felt a sense of peace and connection he found hard to articulate or quantify.
“I’ve never seen a banshee. I’ve never seen a ghost. But for me to say, ‘You’re imagining it’, is nonsense. I can’t say that they’re wrong,” Ray ponders.
“There are people, far more intelligent than me, who are believers. I think they’ve clearly seen something or believe something I don’t believe.” He chuckles. “I’d like someone to convince me that I’m wrong.”
And what would heaven look like?
“Something involving my children and grandchildren,” Ray says. When he was raising his kids, “I thought I couldn’t love anyone more than that, then the grandchildren came along.”
So heaven, for Ray, would be the South Sydney Rabbitohs winning another premiership.
“And myself being at the game with my grandkids… and a plate of oysters.”
The Last Goodbye premieres on August 14 at 8.30pm on SBS and On Demand.
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