Olivia (Liv) Stocker, the girl who just wanted to save the world, died on Sunday 15 July 2018 at home in Nelson, New Zealand, in the care and company of her husband, Michael (Mike) Stocker. She was 32.
Liv, the bibliophile, blood scientist, budding writer, devoted sister and friend, will be best remembered for her fear of peacocks, like of a beverage or two, dislike of Carmelo Anthony, incredibly strong will, ability to pull off a stunning red dress, captivating personality and beautiful smile.
In an age of groomed images, she was a natural. With the tendency to comfort over fashion, Liv had the careless dignity of someone too preoccupied with serious matters to care what she looked like on a day-to-day basis. She just wanted to be herself, and for others to feel they could do the same.
Born in Nelson, New Zealand, Liv grew up with her father (Haydn Johnson), mother (Ann Johnson, née Coughlan), and two sisters (Antonia and Hillary) always close by. Haydn would read A. A. Milne to her at night. Not just Winnie the Pooh, more his poems. It stuck with her and remained one of her happiest childhood memories.
Driven by her Johnson genes, Liv was a lover of all things words - literature, usage, puns and swears. She never went anywhere without a book bag containing a paperback modern classic and a dog-eared notebook. Compelled by her mother’s genes, she was an unashamed ailurophile (a lover of cats) - always on the lookout for a friendly feline to befriend (for those wondering, sadly Piper never returned home).
Despite being a self-professed book nerd, Liv was a tom-boy by nature and preferred sports (cricket, cross country running, basketball) over the accepted pastimes for a pretty young girl with long blond hair. The sporting endeavours eventually slowed down, but the bookishness never did. Liv completed all of her schoolings within the quaint confines of the Nayland Road Stoke series of schools and excelled in both Science and English along the way. High school brought with it the usual teenage angst, but Liv emerged as a strong young lady with some excellent lifelong friends, a taste for punk rock and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (anything Joss Whedon really), and a boyfriend named Mike.
The influence of a particularly inspiring High School teacher eventually tipped Liv’s academic focus towards the sciences. Liv challenged herself to first-year health science at Auckland University before reuniting with Mike in Dunedin on the pretext that Otago University offered the desired Bachelor of Medical Laboratory Science; a courageous move that was undoubtedly the best decision of her life (although the writer may be a little biased on this point).
Graduating with credit in 2007, Liv started her medical science career at Dunedin Hospital and thrived under the tutelage of some excellent mentors. Blood film morphology soon became her speciality, as did night shifts - a position she often preferred to minimise social interaction and maximise the opportunity to rock out to her own tunes.
Biomedical haematology science was Liv’s calling, her vocation (but not in the religious sense - that definitely wasn’t her), and one that she approached with a determination to do the best for her patients. Liv once wrote:
“A name and a date of birth were enough to bring forth an image of a living, breathing person, and I formed emotional attachments to many of the patients, especially the regulars, despite never meeting them.”
A colleague recently recalled that “working nights with her in Dunedin was probably the most fun I've ever had at work, and she is still one of the best scientists I have ever worked with.”.
An eighteen-month stint at AgResearch’s animal Genomnz DNA Testing Laboratory near Dunedin was enough to turn Liv vegetarian (a conviction she never willingly strayed from). Liv was quickly directed away from the “proper” farmers towards those of a more natural rapport - the alpaca and highland cattle breeders who named and petted their animals. The successful career move lifted Liv’s confidence and added another set of lifelong friends to her growing list.
Liv and Mike married on 30 January 2010. “I Wanna Grow Old With You” by Adam Sandler was read at the service. It was a bloody good night.
Departing Dunedin in search of adventure (another courageous move that Liv later admitted never seemed like a possibility), Liv took one for the MikeLiv team by literally taking on a shit job (a technician position at a London lab weighing poo among other biological samples) while waiting for her HCPC registration to be granted - a mere formality, but many months in the making (don’t get her started on the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the British health system) - before settling in Brighton, England.
Liv explained the move as:
"In 2011, while our friends were in family making mode, my husband and I packed up our smallish life savings and joined many fellow antipodeans in the UK. We came for the work experience, the multiculturalism and the proximity to Europe. Aotearoa is four hours from anywhere, Britain is nine hours from everywhere. The experience I have gained through working in NHS haematology laboratories is undeniable. Every day cases in Britain would warrant popup conferences in New Zealand. The plan was to return home and pass on my experience. Healthcare knowledge should have no borders."
Liv successfully navigated the spectrum lab rats (the stereotypes are real) to become a UKIP / Brexiteers’ worst nightmare - a hardworking, overqualified, foreign-born locum propping up the overstretched NHS. Terrible. Eventually, the two hours each way commute from Brighton to London became too much, and Liv settled into a permanent position at Worthing Hospital with a joint speciality in haematology and transfusion science.
The Brighton years were undoubtedly the happiest of her tragically cut short life - filled with lazy days sipping long black coffees, solving the world’s problems over pints, hanging out with workmates, hosting friends, and reading on the train commute (again, don’t get her started on the reliability of the British train network). When the otherwise inclement Brighton weather permitted, a perfect day entailed taking a picnic of French cheese, a baguette, and a bottle of Cava (the budget having already been blown on the cheese) to a nearby park for a chilled day of people watching, philosophising and reading.
Interspersed with these lazy days were many trips throughout the UK and further afield. Liv grew so much from seeing and experiencing other cultures. A perfect day of travel entailed crisscrossing a European metropolis on foot, taking pit stops at modern art galleries, craft beer bars, second-hand bookshops, and bakeries along the way.
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| Pit stop time? |
As these experiences accumulated, Liv grew into a complex and compelling person to be around with a strong sense of self. She once described herself as “a bit dark, a bit cynical, left-wing, over-analytical and therefore indecisive, inappropriate, and a little scared of children”. She was certainly a dark horse - once winning a Texas Hold’em pub poker league and an all-expenses-paid trip to Melbourne in the process. Rather paradoxically, she also held a secret liking for real crime documentaries while simultaneously despising “who done it” crime fiction books with a passion.
Liv understood what it was like to feel like an outsider and took it upon herself to nurture others, even throughout her angsty teenage years. A people pleaser by nature, she felt a strong empathy for the disadvantaged and oppressed and looked at the world with idealism and an instinct for how things should be. This conviction was not easy for her. It often boiled over into anger, even rage, when confronted with the cynics, incompetent, uncaring and wilfully blind among us. This gave Liv a reputation for being as feisty as she could be gentle. Well known for her explosive rants in and out of the workplace (and on the basketball court!), she wasn’t shy about calling out hypocrisy, injustice or frustration inducing ignorance when she saw it. At times she had the impulse control of Leela from Futurama. In this sometimes blunt way, Liv had a knack for fostering introspection in others. A catalyst for change, she encouraged others to front up to that big decision they had been pondering over. Relocations around the world, job changes, re-training, perhaps even a marriage or two, all owe a debt of gratitude to Liv’s free, determined and clear-sighted advice. As Liv said, “Finesse is not really in my repertoire”.
Despite Liv’s success in practical science, her real passion lay in written words and the minds of those producing them (her Goodreads library records more than 200 completed works). Liv read to transport herself to another location, another time, and most importantly, to another mind (as only the great writers can achieve) - Camus, Orwell, Hemingway, Atwood, Vonnegut, Mansfield, Marquez, Deborah Levy, David Foster Wallace, to name just a few. She was particularly drawn to the reflective self-conscious style of stream of conscious writers who could confront the existence of contradiction within society, and themselves, with honesty. These writers were Liv’s kindred spirits.
Liv would have hated being referred to as “a writer”. However, the characteristics she praised in others were certainly present in her own writing. Given more time, something remarkable would have come from Liv’s creative side, if it hasn’t already. Those who read Liv’s blog and other writings would agree she had a gift for sentence craft, including this cracker:
“My consultant informed me he was rather impressed with my blood. I blushed.”
Liv’s blog is now a tangible legacy, a window into her ailments (both physical and mental), the banal and the profound. Liv acknowledged that her situation was by no means unique, and just wished to reach out to others to show them they were not alone. Her blog had many purposes - a guidebook, updates to friends and family, reflective learning, public therapy, popular science - but at its best, it offered a stream of conscience from a mind in a place none of us would wish to be. An opportunity for her readers to learn, to grow their empathy and understanding.
Returning to New Zealand in July 2015 and unable to work due to ongoing treatment, Liv directed her energies towards amateur biomedical science (with herself as the sole patient, forever scrutinised), volunteering for the Red Cross Refugee Resettlement Programme (supporting families from Bhutan, Myanmar and Colombia), tropical island holidays (including some risky volcano viewing and reef diving), blogging for her dear avid readers, exploring New Zealand like a foreign tourist fresh off the airplane, and hanging out with her sisters and friends (and doing her best to correspond with those further afield).
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| All the best things in life at once |
Liv also took the opportunity to further her studies, completing online and distance courses, and amazingly, enrolling for a full-time post-grad diploma in creative writing via Massey University starting in February 2018. Liv achieved excellent grades (studying far too hard like a true mature student) notwithstanding the slight handicap of periodic radiotherapy treatments, blood transfusions and hospice stays. Liv insisted upon attending her final Twentieth Century Literature exam despite looking rather frail on the given horrible winter day. The results came in at a respectable “B”, and also haemoglobin in the low 80’s… Liv wasn’t finished there. Liv discovered that she’d received an “A” for an essay on a Thomas Pynchon novel (The Crying of Lot 49) that she never submitted (for several reasons, including her health and Piper’s disappearance, despite having poured over the book for weeks). “It’s a compassionate mark Liv, one you know you could have easily achieved in better circumstances. Just take it. You deserve it.” friends and family said. But no. Liv would not allow one of her final acts to be one of dishonesty. She made us promise that the official record would be corrected. The promise has been fulfilled.
Lymphoma and stubbornness aside, life wasn’t always easy for Liv. She suffered bouts of crushing anxiety throughout adolescence and early adulthood fuelled by self-doubt and an overwhelming desire to please others. This anxiety always bristled below the surface, and despite her aspiration for frankness, inflicting discomfort or wounds on others (whether real or perceived), even if to correct a wrong in worldview or actions, inflicted a wound of many magnitudes more on herself. The conflict within her was potent, sometimes all-consuming. Liv expended tremendous energy merely to appear normal, to get through the day and its social interactions with her conscience intact. However, in doing so, she gave so much warmth and benefit to those who sought out her company. People often said how strong Liv was for living with her illness for so long - and she undoubtedly was. But her real strength was in managing this internal conflict, living the absurdity of life, carrying on in the face of ever-increasing obstacles, yet somehow remaining sanguine in the process while the rest of us caught up.
Liv’s writings reveal this underlying character, and the struggle within, with elegance and a level of honest beyond many (and with liberal use of wit, humour and puns to top it off). Liv once said “I need a distinctly set level of despair in order to trigger my creative ambition.” and her writing certainly yielded an unpredictable reward schema only slightly less addictive than the opiates she relied upon. Liv’s prose became an essential outlet for not just her creativity, but also her outpourings of dysfunctions, neuroses and emotions. Her audience, including those of the anonymous internet and depths of her unpublishable black book scribbles, provided a confidant, a punching bag, a pun receptacle or whatever it was she needed when the words began to flow.
Despite being ill, Liv’s death seemed impossible to those around her. Her strength unending. However, Liv confronted her mortality and the contradictions of living head on:
“But I believe Camus. I believe that in order to continue with the absurdity that is life, I have to try to make it better for others. And how do I do that? How, when my master plans required decades, do I condense them into a couple of months? By writing? By voting? By traveling, giving my money to remote communities, corrupting them with my Western ways? Really all I am doing is what I want, feeling guilty about it, and then attempting to justify my behaviour.”
So what did Liv want from us? Only to be affected, moved, touched, to be better, do better, whatever that may mean to the individual - question long-held beliefs or assumptions, properly listen to and try to understand someone, expand your mind, plant a tree, make that long procrastinated change, just challenge yourself to be a better person. Liv never wished to hurt or wound, and certainly didn’t want anyone to be burdened by guilt. She went through all this pain so that we didn’t have to, and her legacy lives on in those she touched in this way.
Liv may not have saved the world, but she certainly made it a better place. It breaks my heart to have Liv’s drive and talent cut short, to be denied her companionship and intellect. I will miss you forever Liv and love you more than I ever could show.
Liv was farewelled, at what can only be described as a party, at Rhythm and Brown, a favoured drinking spot where she spent many late hours. Liv’s ashes were scattered in the forever changing sand dunes of Wharariki Beach, to blow carefree in the wilderness while the rest of us carry on her good work.
