In life he was dedicated to kids, helping those around him and making a tangible difference in the world, and in death Tony McClean's inspirational vision and legacy continues to infuse many of the communities he touched.

A year on from the canyoning tragedy that claimed the lives of the courageous Elim Christian College teacher and six students - Natasha Bray, Portia McPhail, Tara Gregory, Anthony Mulder, Floyd Fernandes and Tom Hsu - Tony's parents John and Jeanette have followed through with a project close to their son's heart.

In 2007, Tony's desire to help those less privileged saw him travel to Pokhara, Nepal, where he taught at an international school attached to a leprosy hospital.

‘He met a group of people from a very poor Nepalese village and became involved with an orphanage and programmes for youths,' John explains. ‘He saw an opportunity to try to educate them, give them jobs and keep them well, and came back to New Zealand with the plan of arranging a Kiwi partnership for this redevelopment project. Then the tragedy happened.'

While dealing with the loss of their ‘lively and incredibly passionate' 29-year-old son, John, 54, and Jeanette, 52, stumbled across a startling discovery.

Making a difference

‘We were going through his laptop not long after he died,' John recalls, ‘and found he had a five-year plan with all the money he was going to raise and who he was going to take back to help.'

‘We thought we could still help, so we found a contact, Chanman [Harijan, Tony's friend in Nepal], who John's been emailing,' says Jeanette, who is Elim's international coordinator.

John and Jeanette enlisted the help of family and friends, including Ruth Nixon, Tony's partner at the time of his death. They established the Tony McClean Nepal Trust (TNT), a nod to his ‘dynamite' personality.

With donations of more than $12,000 already, TNT's on the verge of its first initiative in Nepal and a step closer to realising Tony's vision.

‘We thought his idea was inspired and he left us with the tools to do it,' John says, referring to paintings Tony had done featuring Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr, that the trust's selling to raise money.

The knowledge that Tony's memory lives on in so many facets of life has provided great comfort for John and Jeanette. They say their family's journey over the past 12 months has been punctuated with overwhelming highs and severe lows.

‘Looking back, I think we've coped amazingly well,' says Jeanette, who describes the grieving process as a ‘labyrinth' of emotions. ‘You go forward and then you go back, but when you do go back, it's not as far as you were.'

‘Little things catch you,' John, a pastor at their local church in Howick, adds. ‘Six months after [Tony's death] I went to the funeral of a fine Christian man and found myself thinking, "Why didn't my boy have the 90 years of good, contributing life that he did?" His children were celebrating his life and I was mourning the loss of my son.'

John says his close relationship with God has provided him with the strength to ‘stagger on.'

‘About a year before he died, Tony wrote a song called We're Part of Something Big,' Jeanette says. ‘It's become a bit of a theme for us. I have to realise that death, although incredibly painful, is far beyond our understanding and that we are actually part of something much bigger. I have to have faith that Tony's death is part of a whole circle.'

‘We think Tony finished a really good life,' John adds, admitting there are aspects of his eldest son that he would like to emulate. ‘We don't think he had two-thirds of his life stolen from him. He had hundreds of friends all over the place and always made time for people.'

The McCleans, who have three other children, Paul, 27, Dan, 24, and Hannah, 16, say several visits to Mangatepopo Gorge have been instrumental in their healing. Recently, family members and friends returned to take part in the same upstream gorge walk as the teenagers and Tony did.

‘It was just great,' John recalls. ‘We even went a little bit further up than they did, then came back and sat on the ledge [that the group were stranded on while waiting for the rising flood waters to subside] before jumping into the stream. It's amazingly beautiful, just magical.'

‘There was an unrealness about it,' Jeanette adds. ‘It was hard to imagine that it was where it all happened, to envisage it as the roaring torrent that it was.'

They were also shown the spot about 400 metres up the river where Tony, Tom (who was found strapped to his teacher's back) and Portia were discovered.

‘I was expecting it to be sadder, but I felt exhilarated and at peace,' John says. ‘We think it was his life's calling to be there for those kids as he was always particularly encouraging.'

Jeanette adds, ‘I know they wouldn't have been fearful.'

The families of the victims and the four survivors have taken part in a restorative justice process with the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre staff. They say a unique bond has been formed as a result of the event.

‘We see them as friends,' John says. ‘It's a shared pain. They know how much it's cost us and we know how much it's cost them as well.'

‘As Ruth summed it up to me recently, "You can't have two deaths,"' Jeanette says. ‘We've actually got to live.'

By Sarah Mason

You can help

Donations to the Tony McClean Nepal Trust can be made by bank transfer to 06-0293-0101728-00 or by mail to PO Box 38-512, Howick 2145.

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