and then …
… and then your son asks if he can visit the place ‘where daddy died’ and so you wag a morning off school and drive down to Tamarama while the rest of the city sleeps and you find the gulls lying upon the beach with their beaks tucked under their wings, and you kick off your shoes and walk down onto the sand amidst sculptures that have washed-up like treasures from the deep, and you watch as your boy scrambles onto the cliffs and picks a tiny yellow flower which he carries down carefully for you, and you attempt to answer the hardest questions, questions without answers, and you try not to cry as your daughter looks for her father’s footprints in the sand, and then you all return to the car and drive back through the city which is awake now and glittering in the mid-morning sunshine and you are all so quiet, lost in your thoughts and your love and your pain …
… and then you’re sitting at home, alone, surrounded by a thousand physical reminders of your old life, struggling simply to draw breath when an envelope arrives through your door and inside is a card with a sprig of freshly-pressed thyme and a piece of feathery tissue paper which you carefully unfold to reveal a poem handprinted with painstaking care, and you read the words which speak to you in ways you had forgotten words could, and even though you can’t stop the tears you know that the sheer pointlessness-of-carrying-on that you have been wrestling with has been proven false by this simple kindness from a stranger who understands, and while you don’t know this person you want to somehow thank them for their gesture and tell them that their envelope contained so much more than a card and a poem and a sprig of green from a faraway garden; you want to tell them that their envelope contained hope …
… and then, when the tears have dried, you lift your gaze and look about at the vast, transparent house you now reside in and you see how many walls there are to hang pictures upon and you think about how best to honour your husband’s ‘heritage of joy’, and you wonder if you’re even brave enough to try, but you know you must, so even though you’re terrified, and even though you know you’re not the same person you were four months ago, you open your laptop and you begin to write, one word at a time, you begin to write again.
and then …