DEATH AT THE DINNER TABLE

I always considered myself almost a connoisseur of death. A master of sorts. I spent my childhood in the staff room of my parents funeral home in regional New South Wales, and woke up often to my dad quietly slipping out the front door under the blanket of dark to respond to late night transfer calls. 

We sat down to dinner each night after a long day at school. “6 in today” Dad would tell Mum. “Busy week”. 

Joan Didion “sat down to dinner and life as she knew it ended”. We were on opposite sides of the coin. Alternate dimensions. The worst day of her life was for us, casual chat over chicken and potatoes.

When my partners mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2021, I was completely shattered, but I felt like I should know what to do. I should keep cool. “Death? We go way back.” I’d try convincing myself the news didn’t hit me like the truck that hit the others. I was so desensitised to death that I almost didn’t think it was real. I think I denied her eventual passing for a while longer than everyone else did. The word ‘terminal’ meant nothing to me in those early months.

As her cancer progressed, I began to realise that I did know death, but not personally. My entire life I had kept the reality of my parents vocation separate from the life I was living, and only now were those boundaries so quickly blurring into one another.

I assumed that having grief as my Unofficial Middle Name would prepare me for what was to come. If that failed, I thought my parents would know what to do or what to say. Their professional empathy was helpful in the beginning. Soon however, I began to despise it. I was horrified to think that I may have spoken with the same stoic tone in the past, filling in a generic mental template of the right thing to say. 

“How dare they go all funeral director on me?” I would think angrily after pressing end on a call. Everything felt straight out of the guidebook. “They say this shit to everyone.” They spoke cleanly and methodically. Calmly. My grief felt messy. I wanted to sit in the mud. I needed them to meet me there, not try to pull me out.

I lay in bed late at night and thought about where I would be when we got The Call. What would I do? Would I cry? Would we rush to the hospital? How should I conduct myself? I’d never been on the other side of the phone like this before. 

When I was a kid and Dad was on-call for work my brother and I had our routine locked and loaded when the phone rang. We sprung into action when we heard it. It was a different ringtone to the one he had on his personal phone - the Old Phone Apple ringtone, as opposed the Depeche Mode song we heard when his father called. We saw it as a competition to get the phone to him the quickest, and then waited for him to announce “a bit of hush, I’m on the work phone” as a marker that the game had finished before he retreated to our home office and closed the door behind him. We played quietly until the door reopened. When we spent an hour or so watching ABC3 at the funeral home after school, we knew never to run and only to leave the staff room to use the bathroom or sneak a biscuit from the old tin in the kitchen where my Grandma prepared coffee and tiny sandwiches for the wakes. If we happened to bump into a family in the hall, we were to give a respectful nod and be on our way. It was our everyday routine. As a kid, I never thought about what it would be like to be on the other side of the phone, or the one washing my hands next to a primary schooler before I arranged a funeral. As a teen, I wondered how it would feel. I guess I would wait and find out for myself. 

I got The Call as the 59 tram pulled into Queen Victoria Market on a cold Wednesday morning. It wasn’t how I had planned it all those late nights. The silence on the callers end told me everything I needed to know. It was finally time to face it. Time to feel what the families on the other side of Dad’s phone did.

The receptionist at the hospital nodded silently to us when we arrived outside of visiting hours. When we were eventually ushered out of her small, sterile, temporary final home, the hospital manager wrung his hands. “Let’s rock and roll” he clapped, like he was calling his family to leave a Saturday BBQ. He was new, and hadn’t done this before. I could tell. My parents would never say that. I would never say that. My two worlds had well and truly crashed into each other.

Back at their family home, I gave my partner space to sit with his dad and sisters. With the sound of muffled sobs echoing through the wall, my fingers traced the bookcase in the back room we’d fashioned into a temporary bedroom for him. I had looked online for books that he could read in the months prior, hoping they would comfort him the way his mum would no longer be able to. A dustcover caught my eye, and I pulled the book out. It sat it on my lap. The moment lasted years. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. 

It had been on a google list of the Ten Best Books For Grief, and I hadn’t yet bought it because I preferred the Collins Modern Classics version. This was hardcover, yellowed by the sun, and would have to do for now. As my gaze brushed the spine I noticed a number of torn papers shoved between the pages. I opened to the first one and came face to face with her. Brown paper, grey lead, scrawled on a slant. “Pretty cool customer” it read. The bookmarked page recounted Joan’s experience at the hospital receiving the news that her husband had just died. Her social worker told the doctor Joan had been a “pretty cool customer” when it came to John’s death. Maybe she was composed. Maybe she was just in shock.

Down the page, my partner’s mum had underlined a passage. There was a star next to it, made of two scrawled triangles. I thought about what it might have meant to her.

“I wondered what an uncool customer would be allowed to do. Break down? Require sedation? Scream?”

I felt like spending my childhood in and around funerals had immediately lumped me in with the “cool customers” Joan's social worker had talked about. I felt I had to find strength. I had to shepherd the others through this part of the pain. With hot tears on my neck, I folded the paper and put it the pocket of my jeans. Then I flipped back to page one.

Joan became my prophet and my daily meditation. How could she so accurately describe the indescribable? She had already done the work - read all the books and collected all the quotes and concepts that would soon become my deepest comfort. Her memoir fell into my lap at precisely the moment I needed it most. 

In my journal, once I had finished the book, I went through all of my folded page corners and copied out all the phrases that moved me and the quotes she’d found comfort in that had helped me make sense of all these new and unknown feelings. I had dog-eared the bottom of pages with lines I loved, and the top of pages with sentiments I wanted to come back to. 

D.H Lawrence poked at my self pity. 

“A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself”. 

His connection of grief to nature grounded me.

C.S Lewis thought of it as habitual. 

“I keep on, through habit, fitting an arrow to a string, and then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them, but now there’s an impassable frontierpost across it”. 

His poetics moved me.

Joan Didion described the simplicity of it all. 

“How could he come back if he had no shoes?”

Her frankness spoke to the pain that sat heavy inside of me.

I was familiar with the five stages of grief. It had been outlined in a pamphlet that sat on the front desk of my parents funeral home. I read it over and over while I was bored and waiting for Mum to finish ‘paying the people’. It had always seemed always kind of methodical to me. On the same day the family were in ‘denial’, Mum sent the  paperwork to Births, Deaths and Marriages, and Dad helped prepare the body for the viewing. Everything was in its right place. An order of business. But I found out through my own grief that it’s not methodical. Joan thought this too. As she was being rushed to the hospital alongside her deceased husband, the staff around her moved efficiently and stoically. She wanted time to stop. She wanted to give up on being a “cool customer”. I did too.

The book and my journal travelled everywhere with me. People and flowers and frozen trays of spanakopita filled every inch of the house. I wouldn’t be mad if I never ate it again. Everything was so jarring and strange, and everyone told us that routine would help. Apart from a strong coffee in the morning and a cab sav in the evening, my only routine was to journal about the previous nights reading, and then read more. The outside world was too much. I felt as though by taking refuge in Joan’s grief, it wasn’t as if I was truly avoiding my own.

I was unable to put a name to the mass sitting in my chest, and I couldn’t find the words to explain that I felt as though I was teetering on the edge of something - yearning, feeling forcibly propelled forward. I was dizzy and exhausted and there was no end in sight. Joan got it. It was like she held a mirror up to myself. It was a silent confirmation that this journey we were embarking on had moments of mercy. I saw myself in her, and she seemed to see me back. It felt motherly, like a guiding love so similar to the one we had just lost.

It’s been three years since my phone rang on the 59 tram. My relationship with death has changed dramatically. I feel like I am closer to understanding it now. In the months that followed her death I found myself feeling more capable of putting words to the feelings I didn’t understand before. It felt like my life was a train that kept steadily moving along, but we had left her at the last stop and there was no going back for her. As the train moved further down the line, it got harder to make out her expression. As we round the bend after all this time, I can’t see her standing there anymore. I remember touching her hands as she lay back in her bed at the house. I promised myself I wouldn’t forget how soft they were. I feel almost ashamed of the version of myself that saw it all so simply. I can’t talk about it at the dinner table anymore. 

Joan Didion placed the perfect definition of the difference between grieving and mourning on her poetic silver platter and I read it over a piece of stale toast.

“Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention”. 

It made so much sense. And so it started. We began to set a place at the table for the sadness that was paying emotional rent in our lives. I’m not sure I will ever set the table for one again. Mourning was here now, and it would never really leave.

The Year of Magical Thinking became the first of many. “More helpful than therapy” I would laugh to my friends when they asked how I was coping. The stack of books on my bedside table grew taller, and the collection of quotes in my journal became longer. Memoirs mostly, and a little bit of fiction. I felt like an explorer of grief, moving through space and time, collecting specimens that I would report back to my partner on. I related them to myself in my writing, and to him in my thinking. I still felt a duty to fulfil my title of Funeral Directors Mature and Knowledgable (And Not Sad) Daughter, but I promised to be less hard on myself. I wasn’t a consultant, or a child overhearing our sad story amongst the click and turn of a tube of lipstick before my parents ran out the door to meet their friends for dinner. I was living it. All along I thought I had been, but as I came to realise, I had never even come close.

I didn’t go anywhere near a self help guide to grief during this time, and I can’t see myself going near one anytime in the future. The pamphlets on my parents front desk weren’t going to do it for me. There is no guide to grief, no method to the ebbs and flows of emotion, no order to the instances where tears come like waves and where you choke but nothing comes out. I needed honesty. I needed to hear the experiences of real people who had been through it and who had found the time to find the right words to explain it. I needed to take my time with it too. 

As I turned the pages of the memoir, I not only began to feel closer to myself, but I felt closer to my partner’s mum. The torn pieces of brown paper that sat wedged between the pages led me to wonder which parts had stood out to her, and her grey lead underlines made me wonder why they had. Maybe she wrote in her journal about them too. Did she ever really believe that she would be in the same position as Joan one day? Was she bookmarking these pages for her, or for us?

Reading her copy of the book felt intimate - the last thing we would do together. It felt like a sort of growth. Finding the parts of herself that she had left between chapters five and six were almost an invitation to open up and make space inside myself. Through Joan, I became more deeply connected to her.

I find it funny that when it all really came down to it, I didn’t need any of the Funeral Directors Daughter knowledge that I had been carefully storing, ready to pull out like a party trick. What I needed was truth. I needed someone to be honest in their advice and their experiences. I wanted someone to acknowledge that I would never ever really be “over it”. It was Joan who did.

On the book’s last page, Joan writes:

“I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. 

Let them become the photograph on the table.

Let them become the name on the trust accounts. 

Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water”. 

I don’t think I will be able to do this for a long time. I want to hold onto her for a while longer. I want to keep her  next to me forever. But I know that when that moment comes, Joan’s hand will be on my shoulder, just like hers would be. 

I went to a gala dinner recently to celebrate ninety years of the funeral association my family is part of. It was the first time I had been to one of these events as an adult. There was a slideshow on loop and I watched as my brother and I grew up in photos. People I hadn’t seen in years struggled to hide their surprise when Dad reintroduced me. I wonder if I look more experienced now. I wonder if they can tell I’ve felt it first hand. I know grief changed me. I think I see it differently now. 

The place at our table is still set for her. It always will be. It all feels so far away, but every now and then I get a glimpse of how it felt the day she was diagnosed. I sat in the car in her driveway and couldn’t take my hands off the steering wheel. I had held it together on the drive there - the Eastern Freeway snaking in front of me, keeping my mind at ease and tears at bay. Once we arrived, I couldn’t find it in myself to go inside. It would mean that it was real. I remember telling my partner as I finally cried that I didn’t know what it would be like once we stepped through the door. I had no idea what grief really looked like, or how it felt to live it. I was terrified of it. Who knew that something I thought I knew so well was actually something I feared so deeply. After a few minutes and a tight squeeze of my hand, we went inside, had chicken and potatoes for dinner, and talked about anything else.