Death is rarely pretty, wrote Adele Horin, not long before she died. She gathered family and friends around her bed and planned the poems to be read and the people to speak on her passing. "I'd like you to keep it short," she told her brother Laurie. "And try to be interesting."
Even at the end she thought of others, he told those gathered at the Macquarie Park Crematorium, in North Ryde, on Friday. They filled the chapel and spilled outside into the cool air – the young, the young-old and old-old – to farewell the former Sydney Morning Herald social affairs journalist and columnist, and popular blogger.
Some knew her only by her unsparing stories about the plight of the poor and abused, for whom she filled so many pages with precise shorthand.
"She had an insatiable curiosity about how people lived their lives," said friend and former colleague Deborah Smith. That curiosity took Horin into teenage squats and refuges, into Chile and Afghanistan to report on human rights abuses, into central Australia to meet men fixing the dingo fence, their faces like "desert lizards".
The last thing she typed was on her Coming of Age blog, a week before dying of lung cancer on November 21, aged 64. "Dear reader, my luck has run out," she wrote, lamenting that she wouldn't get to be "one of those feisty octogenarians I so admired".
In her final days, she was still busy arranging long-term care for her mum. One night, stuck in bed and barely able to talk, she ran a hand over her son Sam's face. "Wow, you've got a big nose," she said, managing a smile.
Old age is 15 years away, Horin often said. But she was mature beyond her years, Laurie reckoned.
A two-year-old toddler, with thick, tangled hair, who was sent to the shops by their mother to buy sliced bread – but came home with chocolate slices. A six-year-old girl announcing she was going to be a journalist. A young woman with the light glowing under her bedroom door as she worked late into the night, trying to make sense of the world.
At home in Sydney years later, Horin dedicated herself to fighting a rearguard action against planned obsolescence, pledging fealty to her old fridge. She praised the beauty of the crevices, marks and splotches on the face of artist Margaret Olley.
"It's not looks but how one lived" that's important, Horin once wrote. She should have lived longer, her friends said, as they walked slowly from her funeral, happy still to have known her so long.
The poems that Horin chose for the service were arresting, unsentimental and uncompromising – a mirror to her own stories. "Do all things come to an end?" asked one. "No, they go on forever."
