Grief Sharpens Against Banality

I’m driving down Tuggeranong Parkway, middle of morning peak hour, heading to Bunnings for something I’ll forget by the time I get there. Traffic’s crawling. Someone’s on their phone two cars ahead, I can see the glow of the screen through their back window, and the rest of us are paying for it. Radio’s on, some interview I stopped listening to ten minutes ago. Sun’s hitting the windscreen at exactly the wrong angle and I’m squinting, one hand on the visor, the other loose on the wheel, irritated in that low-grade way you get when nothing’s particularly wrong but nothing’s particularly right either.

And then she’s there. Not a thought about her. Not a memory floating up. She’s actually there. The air in the car changes, warmer, denser, like something just arrived that wasn’t here a second ago. That specific weight of another person beside you. I can feel it on my skin, that prickle of proximity, and I haven’t looked yet. My hands stay on the wheel. Traffic moves a metre. I brake. The car ahead has a bumper sticker I’ve read four times now: “My other car is a broomstick.” Someone’s indicator is clicking out of sync with mine. And she’s there, in the passenger seat, in the warmth on my left side, in the way the car suddenly feels occupied instead of empty. I know how that sounds. I know what you’re thinking. But my body knows it before my brain has time to argue.

My hand starts to move. Automatic. Eight and a half years of drives, of course my hand goes there. Towards her thigh. That little squeeze I used to give her when we were heading somewhere together. I’m already starting to say something, something about the bloke on his phone, something ordinary,

I turn my head.

The seat is empty. Black leather. Seatbelt tucked in its holder. Sun falling across where her legs would be. My hand hovers there, mid-air, over nothing.

And for a second, maybe two, I don’t understand. I actually don’t understand. Some part of my brain is trying to reconcile what I felt with what I’m seeing and it can’t. She was there. She was right there. And now there’s just a seat and a seatbelt and my hand hanging in the air like an idiot.

A horn blares behind me. Traffic’s moved. I haven’t.

I put my hand back on the wheel. I drive. My face feels hot. I don’t know if it’s the sun or something else.

The next few minutes are strange. I’m driving but I’m not quite driving. Going through the motions while something in me is still back there, still sitting with the empty seat. I miss my turn. Have to loop around through the industrial estate, past the tile warehouse and the bathroom showroom. A truck pulls out in front of me and I brake too hard. The shopping list is gone, whatever I came for has completely left my head.

I end up in the Bunnings carpark anyway. Engine off. Hands still on the wheel.

I should go in. I should do the thing I came to do. But I can’t remember what it was and I can’t quite make my legs move yet. So I sit there, in the aftermath, while the carpark does its carpark things around me. Trolleys rattle past. A tradie in hi-vis walks by arguing into his phone. Someone loads timber into a trailer, the planks clattering.

I’m not crying. I’m not having a breakdown. I’m just paused. Suspended. Like the world kept going and I got stuck at a round-about back there and I haven’t caught up yet.

This happens. That’s what I need you to understand. This isn’t a one-off. This isn’t grief playing tricks. This happens.

Last Tuesday I was making coffee. Waiting for the kettle. Looking at nothing. And I felt her behind me. Not a memory of her in the kitchen. Her. Present tense. Standing by the fridge where she used to stand when she was waiting for her coffee.

I almost said it. “Want one?” The words were in my mouth, shaped and ready.

I turned around anyway. Couldn’t help it.

Empty kitchen. Hum of the fridge. Kettle building to its click.

I stood there for a while. Longer than made sense. The kettle clicked off and I didn’t move. The water would be cooling, losing that first boil, and I knew I should pour it but I couldn’t make the sequence of actions happen. Eventually I did. Made the coffee. Drank it standing up because sitting down felt like a decision and I wasn’t ready for decisions.

The rest of the morning was like that. Off by a beat. I put things in wrong places. Forgot what I walked into rooms for. Snapped at an email that didn’t deserve it. The presence had lasted maybe eight seconds but the aftermath stretched for hours.

That’s the bit nobody tells you about. Not the visitation itself. The after. The way your whole system needs to recalibrate and there’s no instruction manual for it.

Not every time is like that though. Sometimes it’s fainter. A few weeks ago I was on a work call, half-listening to someone explain a budget problem, and I felt something. A flicker. Warmth at the edge of my attention. I wasn’t even sure it was her. Could have been the heater kicking in. Could have been nothing.

I lost track of the call. Someone asked me a question and I had to say “Sorry, can you repeat that?” and I sounded like I hadn’t been paying attention because I hadn’t been paying attention. I was too busy trying to figure out if she was there or if I was imagining it.

She wasn’t. Or she was but only barely. Or the call was too loud and too boring and she didn’t stick around. I don’t know. That one didn’t feel like anything except distraction. Just inconvenient. Just badly timed.

They’re not all meaningful. I’ve stopped expecting them to be.

Three weeks before the kitchen, I woke at 2am. Not from a dream, not from a noise. Just woke. And the bed felt different. Her side, weighted. Not movement. Presence. That sense of someone there, the mattress holding something that shouldn’t be there but is.

I lay completely still. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t move. Like if I stayed frozen enough, it would last.

It didn’t. I reached across eventually, couldn’t stop myself, and there was nothing but cold sheet. The hollow where a body hadn’t been for three years.

I didn’t sleep again. Just lay there in the dark, watching the ceiling change as the night wore on. Car headlights swept across the wall occasionally. A possum thumped across the roof around 4am. The birds started up before it was even light.

Some nights I wish she wouldn’t come.

That’s the thing I haven’t said out loud to anyone. Some nights I’m exhausted, not just tired, emptied, and I just want to sleep. Close my eyes. Not feel anything for eight hours. And then she’s there. The weight on the bed. The warmth in the room. And I can’t ignore it. I can’t sleep through it. I have to be awake with it, hold it, let it run its course.

It costs something. Every time. I don’t know how to say that without sounding ungrateful, without betraying the thing I have with her. But it costs something to be visited by someone you love who’s dead. It takes energy you don’t always have. And sometimes the timing is shit. Sometimes you need a night off and you don’t get one.

A few months ago I was on the phone with a mate. He was going through something, marriage trouble, real trouble, the kind where you need someone to just listen. And I was listening. I was actually present for once, actually being useful, and then I felt it. That warmth. That shift in the air.

Not now, I thought. Please. Not now.

But she doesn’t take requests. She was there, filling up the room, and my mate was mid-sentence about something his wife had said, something that mattered, and I lost the thread. I was nodding into the phone, making the right noises, but I wasn’t there anymore. I was split between him and her, and she was winning, and I hated her for it.

I was cranky with her. For about thirty seconds, I was actually cranky with her for showing up right then. For pulling my attention. For not letting me be a good friend when someone needed me to be.

And then I hated myself for getting cranky with her. And by the time I came back to the call, my mate had stopped talking. Waiting. I’d missed something. Something important.

“Sorry,” I said. “Say that again?”

He did. But his voice was different. He knew I’d drifted. And I couldn’t explain where I’d gone.

That’s what this costs sometimes. Not just energy. Relationships. Moments that mattered. I failed him that night because she showed up and I couldn’t hold both of them at once.

I have a place for her at home. A white cupboard with her urn, her perfume, fresh flowers when I remember, photos of her looking the way she liked to look. Some of her beautiful clothes I bought her, folded carefully. It’s not a shrine exactly. It’s just where she is now.

Some days I stand there. Some anniversary or other, or no reason at all. I’ll light a candle, straighten the photos, open one of the perfume bottles just to smell her. Doing the things you’re supposed to do. Waiting to feel connected.

Nothing. She’s not there. Just objects. Just an urn and some fabric and photos that don’t move.

I felt like an idiot last time. Standing in my own house, performing grief for no one, waiting for something that wasn’t coming. The candle flickering. The flowers starting to droop. Me, just standing there.

I gave up. Went to get groceries. And halfway to the shops, on Hindmarsh Drive, stuck behind a bus, there she was. That warmth in the passenger seat. That presence.

I laughed out loud. Of course. Of course she wouldn’t be at the bloody cupboard. She’d rather be in a car going somewhere. She’d rather haunt the traffic than sit next to her own ashes waiting for me to light a candle.

That one felt different. Lighter. Almost like a joke we were sharing. Like she was taking the piss out of me for standing at the cupboard. I could hear exactly what she would have said about it. I almost said something back.

The presence faded somewhere around the Cotter Road turnoff. By the time I got home it was just me again, letting myself into an empty house, putting the kettle on for no one.

I keep her perfume. All of it. Every bottle I ever gave her, lined up on her cupboard. I opened one last week. Flowerbomb. Duty-free at Charles de Gaulle, on the way home from Paris.

I wasn’t trying to summon anything. I just wanted to smell it.

And then I wasn’t in my bathroom anymore.

I’m in the hotel. Sixth arrondissement, that place with the tiny lift and the courtyard view. She’s been getting ready for an hour. I’m leaning against the doorframe making noise about the restaurant closing. She’s ignoring me. Smart move.

She puts down the lipstick. Looks at herself in the mirror. And I watch something happen in her face.

Not checking her appearance. Feeling it. Settling into her skin like a coat she doesn’t often wear. This rare thing, this hard-won thing, where she let herself believe she looked good, felt good, was allowed to want that.

Georgie didn’t feel beautiful often. Somewhere along the way, long before me, in places I only learned about later, in rooms I wasn’t there to protect her from, she’d learned that her needs didn’t matter. That wanting things for herself was dangerous. That she should be small.

I knew some of that when she was alive. I didn’t know the half.

I close the bottle and I’m back in Canberra, in front of her cupboard, three years after her death. The smell lingers. The memory recedes. And I’m left holding this thing I can’t do anything with.

I know her better now than I did then. That’s not a realisation I arrived at. It’s something that keeps happening. Keeps shifting. A memory I thought I understood will suddenly look different when I see it with what I know now.

There’s a night I used to remember fondly. We were home, nothing special, she was tired and I made dinner and we watched something forgettable and went to bed early. A good night. A quiet night. I’ve thought of it that way for years.

Except now I remember other things about it. How she moved. The way she held her body. That look she’d get when the pain was bad but she didn’t want to say. I didn’t see it then. I saw tired. I saw quiet night in.

Now I see her managing. Hiding. Getting through another day without making it my problem.

The memory hasn’t changed. What I see in it has. And I don’t know what to do with that. Because if that night was different than I thought, then how many other nights? How many “quiet evenings” were actually her white-knuckling through pain while I sat there oblivious, pleased with myself for making pasta?

That’s the thing about knowing her better now. It doesn’t just change how I see her. It changes how I see me. The husband I thought I was. The partner I believed I’d been. It all gets less certain the more I understand what she was carrying.

The guilt comes. Of course it comes. It’s its own kind of presence now. Shows up uninvited, same as she does. Has its own weight, its own texture. Sometimes they arrive together, her warmth on one side, the guilt pressing in on the other. I don’t know if she brings it or if they just travel the same roads.

I was at the shops last week. Self-checkout. Scanning groceries, not thinking about anything. And suddenly I’m back in our kitchen and she’s saying “I’m fine” and I’m believing her. I can see her face. The effort in it. The lie she told to protect me from worrying. And I’m standing there with a tin of tomatoes in my hand and the machine’s saying “unexpected item in bagging area” and I can’t move.

The woman behind me sighs. Loudly.

I scan the tomatoes. Wrong button. Have to call the attendant. She comes over, fixes it, doesn’t look at me. The woman behind me sighs again.

I finish. Pay. Walk to the car. Sit there for ten minutes before I can drive.

That’s how it works now. Grief in the checkout line. Guilt at the self-serve. Presence in traffic. None of it waits for a convenient moment. None of it cares that you’re in public, that people are waiting, that you’re supposed to be functioning.

I can’t apologise to her. That’s the thing about the dead. They don’t take apologies. They just stay dead and you stay here with the inventory of things you should have seen.

Except she’s not entirely dead, is she? She’s in the car. She’s in the warmth on my right side. She’s in the weight of the bed at 2am.

So I apologise. Into the air. Into the empty passenger seat. Not knowing if it lands. Not knowing if forgiveness is what I’m even asking for.

Some days the presence feels like an answer. Like she’s here to say: enough. Stop. I know.

Some days the guilt arrives alone and she doesn’t, and I don’t know what that means.

Some days they both come and I can’t tell if they’re working together or against each other or if they’re just two things that happen to live in the same place now.

Or maybe none of it means anything. Maybe presence is just love that hasn’t agreed to end. Love that keeps reaching for her leg. Love that fills up cars and kitchens because it has nowhere else to go and death didn’t give it permission to stop. And guilt is just the tax on having been human, having been imperfect, having loved someone without seeing all of them.

I’m still in the Bunnings carpark. Don’t know how long now. Long enough that the sun’s moved and the shadows are different.

A woman walks past pushing a trolley with pot plants in it, a toddler in the seat grizzling about something. A ute pulls in next to me, too close, nearly takes my mirror off. The bloke gets out, slams the door, walks away without looking back.

My phone buzzes. A text. Something I need to deal with.

I should go in. Buy whatever I came for. Drive home. Make dinner. Answer the text. Do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

I reach for the door handle.

The air on my right side is still warm. Just faintly. Like a question that doesn’t need an answer. Like something that might stay or might go and doesn’t owe me either.

My phone buzzes again.

I take my hand off the door handle. Put it in my lap. Sit with the warmth for another minute.

The toddler’s still grizzling. A trolley clatters somewhere. Someone starts an engine.

I know she’s dead. I know I’m here. I know the car is cooling and the afternoon is passing and eventually I’ll have to move.

But not yet.