The first hour was the bereavement booklet.

I was with Emma’s parents in a small lounge off to the side of the Emergency Department. It was a nicer set-up than the general waiting room. Sofas were provided, rather than plastic chairs. This was my first hint, when the doctors brought me there a few hours earlier, that something was wrong. They had already explained to me what had happened. Now they told Emma’s parents. In the days to come, I would return again and again to the hospital to seek clarification as to what had happened in those hours. No answer was satisfying. For now, the focus was on me. One of the nurses who had been part of the support team looking after Emma came in, along with a case worker. For sudden deaths, you as the ‘significant other’ are assigned a case worker, who acts as a counsellor in the aftermath. The nurse, a little shamefaced, was holding something.

‘This is for you,’ he said, handing me the Bereavement Booklet: Information for Family and Friends. There was a soothing coastal scene depicted on the cover.

‘Thanks.’ I noticed a slip of paper tucked inside.

‘Yeah, you don’t have to fill that in,’ the nurse began. It was a feedback form. For the bereaved to let the hospital know how useful they found the booklet. Everything needs feedback these days.

‘We have to put it in there,’ the nurse said lamely. ‘I mean, you can fill it in, or throw it away. No one’s expecting you to …’ He trailed off as I nodded. The booklet opened with useful advice like: ‘The first steps after someone has died’ (‘Inform family and friends’ – presumably filling in the feedback form comes later); ‘Practical and legal matters’, ‘Organ and tissue donation’; ‘Registering a Death’. A little later comes advice on managing grief, the importance of getting help if overwhelmed, how to tell children that loved ones are no longer with them, and lists of phone numbers for support services. And then the final page:

Disclaimer: The advice and information contained herein is provided in good faith as a public service. However the accuracy of any statements made is not guaranteed and it is the responsibility of readers to make their own enquiries as to the accuracy, currency and appropriateness of any information or advice provided. Liability for any act or omission occurring in reliance on this document or for any loss, damage or injury occurring as a consequence of such act or omission is expressly disclaimed.

It was very moving. I’m not sure at the time what struck me more: the tone of ‘deep sigh, our lawyers insisted we put this in’, or the flagrant disregard for Oxford commas. But in the midst of my grief, being presented with a fact-checking task to focus on was a relief. Who knows what else I might have been thinking about.

 

 

The first day after the first hour were the phone calls.

Or at least, delaying the phone calls for as long as possible. And I discovered something remarkable as I tried to sleep. She wasn’t dead yet. She was still alive as far as most of the world was concerned. She would only die when I made the phone calls. Two years later, all the bills are still in her name. As far as the utility companies are concerned, Emma is alive. She pays her bills on time. She was still alive on Monday morning, the fifth of December, hours after the doctors had claimed that she had passed. The process would begin properly once I started the calls.

Informing the people around you requires a ranking system. Parents. Immediate family. Close friends. Friends. Friendly acquaintances. Primary school friends I added on Facebook in 2007 and haven’t corresponded with in twenty years. Her parents already knew. My parents did not. They would be first. My father broke down almost immediately. As happens so often in these situations, I was the one comforting him, assuring him that everything was going to be fine. That one call was enough. It was almost 11 am. Was it worth bothering my closest friends at work? No. I allowed procrastination to take over. Better to call them later. After work perhaps. That would be better. I wasn’t sure how people were going to react.

My parents came over immediately. In the first stage of grief, the mind will do anything to distract itself. In my parents’ case, it was my mother’s parking. No sooner had they walked in the door, tears streaming down their faces, than my father had looked outside at the car park in front of our (my?) unit.

‘Ailsa, you’ve parked over the lines,’ he admonished my mother.

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Come and look.’

‘Oh, right.’

Searing, mind-numbing grief at the loss of my partner of thirteen years was one thing, but such a breach of parking etiquette could not stand. The necessary adjustments were made, and the less serious business of grieving could begin. Later that day my sister weighed in. Her aid came in the form of fifteen ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Later, she told me the intention was to make just a couple, but she zoned out and, like Topsy, it just grew. Uncertain how to wrap so many sandwiches, she opted for a collective rather than an individual approach. They were wrapped together, as a whole. Imagine a basketball, composed not of rubber and leather, but of sandwiches. This unlikely object was handed over to me two hours after the parking incident, ten hours after Emma died, with the line, ‘I thought you might be hungry.’ I wasn’t, and to this day I’ve never had the heart to tell her that the sandwich ball sat in my fridge untouched for nearly a month before I threw it out.

 

The second day after the first hour was with Emma’s parents.

I had spent the previous night in their sprawling mansion, phoning friends, drinking, messaging friends via social media, drinking. Tuesday I slept in, only to be woken by calls. It was now my turn to receive, rather than give. No one knows what to say. Grief amplifies every emotion you feel a thousandfold, including mild irritation.

‘Andrew?’

‘Hey.’

‘I … there are no words.’

‘Then why are you calling?’

Of course, I didn’t say that out loud. I would get used to hearing ‘there are no words’ over the coming weeks, as it has now decisively replaced ‘I’m so sorry’ as the layperson’s go-to line when dealing with loss. The morning was spent mumbling replies over the phone to the condolences of friends, before the first mourner arrived at the house. Sister Teresina had known Emma for years and was a close friend of her parents. An elderly Irish-Catholic nun, she ticked all the boxes in terms of the clichés of her kind: wicked sense of humour; self-deprecating references to potatoes. Today she had moved firmly into ‘spiritual warrior’ mode. Not for the first time, I appreciated the tremendous power organised religion wields in these moments. There are no bereavement booklets or expressions like ‘there are no words’. Instead, the weight of two thousand years of tradition is brought down on the situation, starting with the card stating that a mass had been said in Emma’s name earlier that morning. I didn’t have the heart to point out that we were both atheists. It’s the thought that counts, a friend would remind me a few days later.

‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in it, Teresina does.’

In terms of handling my grief, she was all business.

‘It’s a terrible loss, Andrew, a terrible loss.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I am so terribly sorry.’

‘I know, it’s awful.’

‘There will be a void in your life.’

‘Um, sure.’

‘A void that you will want to fill.’

‘I’ll see how I go.’

She meant well. At the same time, I knew enough about religion to know that this was when they got you. Given the circumstances, was it a faux pas to resist the call to surrender my rationally held beliefs and embrace the divine?

 

The first week after the first hour was contacting the funeral directors.

We decided on a burial. Or rather, I decided on a burial. I’m not sure that there would have been any arguments to the contrary. It’s still a blur as to how we chose the funeral directors, but we went with a well-known national company with an all-female staff. Rhonda was sent out. On the Wednesday of the first week, we all sat down in Emma’s parent’s front room to make the arrangements. I had no idea what was going on. To evade grief, your mind bombards you with fogginess and confusion instead. To make things ‘go more smoothly’, Rhonda decided the first thing I should do was fill out the death certificate, just to make sure all the paperwork was in order. It was explained clearly, with helpful stickers at each section, what I needed to fill out and what I needed to sign. It took me two attempts. The first attempt I went into another room, filled out a third of the death certificate, and froze. No. Not doing this. I walked back to join the others, who didn’t speak.

‘I just need a minute,’ I said. Still nothing. Expectation hanging in the air. I was holding everyone up. So back to it.

With the difficulty of the paperwork out of the way, the rest of the planning could go ahead. A series of questions were thrown, or perhaps lobbed gently, at us. Since it was going to be a burial, what sort of coffin would we like? What sort of coffin would Emma have wanted? Was price an issue regarding said coffin? As I flicked through the glossy pamphlet, my mind turned to Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death, her 1963 exposé of the funeral industry, which she described as being ‘a huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public’. All the tricks and cons that funeral directors engaged in were presented unvarnished to the American public, tricks that kept coming back in flashes as I looked through coffin prices. In one anecdote, Mitford relates how a friend reluctantly told her of her experience in arranging the funeral of a brother-in-law. Seeking to save the widow expense, she chose the cheapest redwood casket in the establishment and was quoted a low price. Later, the salesman called her back to say the brother-in-law was too tall to fit into this casket, she would have to take one that cost a hundred dollars more. When my friend objected, the salesman said, ‘Oh, all right, we’ll use the redwood one, but we’ll have to cut off his feet.’

There was no proposal to cut off Emma’s feet. However, our first choice of casket, the ‘Poplar’, turned out to be unavailable, something that was not revealed until an email was sent two days later. Plan B was the ‘Berwick’ (solid hardwood, rosetan crêpe interior, Victorian cherry stain) for $4,700. Plan C, included because the funeral director had mistaken our derision for enthusiasm, was the ‘Last Supper’ (solid hardwood, rosetan crêpe interior, pecan stain), which featured a gaudy colour reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper on the interior lid, visible to the funeral attendants, if one had an open-casket ceremony. That particular bit of tastelessness would cost you $6,250. The Berwick it was. We would be able to view her just before the ceremony. Music would be playing during that time if we wished.

‘What music?’ I asked.

‘We usually play Enya.’

‘Haven’t I suffered enough?’

‘Okay, no music.’

Rhonda scribbled a quick note, and we moved on.

 

 

Next came the organisation of the post-service reception. Much like the catalogue of coffins, a dazzling array of finger-food options was placed in front of us. Sausage rolls, spring rolls, biscuits, and sandwiches. So many sandwiches. John Montagu’s legacy to the world, laid out in a selection of different menu items. I was beginning to wonder if anyone would care. We were due to meet more caterers for the wake at Emma’s parents’ house. How many different kinds of sandwiches did we need? Once again, I was paralysed by indecision, unsure of the consequences at the post-service reception should I make the wrong choice:

‘Andrew, there are no words. I am so sorry for your loss.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Emma was such a wonderful girl.’

‘Thank you.’

‘With that said, though, these sandwiches are a fucking disgrace. This is the worst funeral I’ve ever been to.’

There were four main options: A, B, C, and ‘Premium’. Each option was dominated by a selection of club sandwiches, all of which included meat. Vegetarians and vegans, it seems, do not require funeral catering. We went with option B, for fifty people: $700 worth of sandwiches (Roast Beef, Cheese and Lettuce! Salmon and Cream Cheese! Tuna, Mayonnaise and Alfalfa!), spring rolls, and mini sausage rolls. Finally, the decision had to be made as to what clothes Emma would be buried in. I would find something and get it to them, I said. That broke me. I was done for the day.

 

The first Friday after the first hour was meeting the celebrant.

The funeral home had assisted with sourcing a celebrant. Like a morbid dating site, we were asked for personal preferences, before Clare was produced. Clare was lovely, but sitting down with her to discuss her role in the service it became obvious that general knowledge was not high on her list of gifts. She was to give a straightforward biographical account of Emma’s life before I would give the eulogy. The first red flag came when Emma’s mother told her that Emma had spent a year studying at the Sorbonne after graduating high school.

‘Lovely,’ Clare said, writing it down. ‘Where’s the Sorbonne?’ Emma’s mother and I looked at each other, then back at Clare.

‘France,’ we said simultaneously. She earnestly wrote that down too. We worked on the order of service, the music that was to be played: Puccini’s ‘One Fine Day’ as people were coming in to the chapel, the overture from Wagner’s Tannhäuser (‘We are not playing the whole thing,’ Emma’s father grumbled) as people reflected after the eulogy, and Leonard Cohen’s ‘If It Be Your Will’ as people filed out to the burial site. Clare’s eyes glazed slightly as she wrote this down. It was clear she hadn’t heard of any of these people. We didn’t judge her. At least not too much. Being a celebrant is a calling. Emma’s mother wanted a passage from Anna Karenina included as part of the final ceremony at the burial site, but couldn’t remember the exact wording. That was fine, Clare said, we could email it to her early next week.

 

The second Wednesday after the first hour was my personal viewing of Emma.

I had been to see her in the morgue the previous Wednesday, before the funeral planning and celebrant booking had begun. I’m still not sure why. In the end, shivering in the cold and holding her hand, I apologised for not getting her to the hospital on time. On the second Wednesday, I was going to see what she would look like for the funeral on Friday. The clothes, the makeup, the hair. The funeral home had a number of different locations around Perth. Her newly made-up and freshly dressed body was being held at the North Perth branch, and I could view (visit? ... the terminology was getting confusing) her at 3 pm. The summer heat was relentless as I arrived via bus. I gave the man at the front desk my name and Emma’s.

‘Right,’ he said, tapping his computer. ‘Well, this is awkward.’

‘What is?’

‘She’s not here.’

‘Well, she can’t have gone very far.’

‘Hang on.’ A phone call was made. The phone was passed over.

‘Andrew? It’s Rhonda. I’m terribly sorry, I sent you an email an hour ago, you mustn’t have checked it. We moved Emma here. She’s in Subiaco. But our viewing hours end soon.’

‘Um, okay, I’ll …’

‘I’ll come and pick you up. Stay there.’

I waited in the North Perth branch as Rhonda drove to get me. Checking my phone, I saw that an email had been sent: ‘Could you please come to Subiaco to spend some time with Emma at 3 pm instead of North Perth as Emma has been bought into my care this afternoon.’ The wording was quite something. I lingered over ‘spend some time’ and ‘into my care’. The feeling rose up for the first time since the first day, she wasn’t actually dead. How could she be? I’d just been invited to spend some time with her. To her credit, Rhonda broke the speed limit and was profusely apologetic as we drove back to Subiaco. I assured her that Emma was fairly disorganised while she was alive and that there was no need for that trend to end just because she was dead. I’m not sure that came out well, as Rhonda breathed in sharply and said nothing further.

 

The second Friday after the first hour was the funeral, and the wake.

I had been to funerals, but I’d never spoken at one. My eulogy had been reviewed by Emma’s mother, by Clare, and by a couple of friends. Everyone thought it was fantastic. A bit of light editing, and it was good to go. When the service began, everything went smoothly – until panic set in. It was happening too smoothly, too quickly. Why were we rushing? Clare had finished her introductory speech. Surely something should have gone wrong by now. I was up there, reading. And I was doing it clearly, decisively, without any tremor in my voice. This was a disaster. I had seen other eulogists break down before they even started speaking. What was wrong with me? When I had read it out, rehearsing to myself, I had broken down at several points. Now I was reading past those anecdotes and remembrances with confidence. Perhaps my background as a lecturer used to addressing large audiences had kicked in, but this didn’t look good. Funerals were a time for wailing and gnashing of teeth, for rending garments. A confidently delivered eulogy and well-chosen sandwiches were not the done thing.

By the time I made it to the last page, emotion had welled up. Thank God. I wanted to be seen to be devastated, not just feel it. As I read, and began to cry, part of me had stepped aside to analyse my performance, realising that it was a performance. A performance that was not quite over yet, but one in which the present act was coming to an end. I sat down, as Clare announced the time for reflection and mispronounced ‘Wagner’. People then filed out of the chapel to the burial site.

This ceremony was much shorter. Clare spoke briefly as she prepared to read the final passage that Emma’s mother had chosen from Emma’s favourite book.

‘And now I will read a passage from the novel Tolstoy, by Anna Karenina,’ Clare solemnly intoned. A ripple went through the mourners, followed by murmurs. I exchanged looks with a friend sitting across on the other side of the plot. It should have been a look of shared grief, a recognition of loss unendurable. Instead, he gave me a quizzical look, and mouthed, ‘What the fuck?’ Later, when Emma’s parents and I looked back over the email exchange between ourselves and Clare, we realised it could have been worse. Initially, she was under the impression that the novel was called Tall Story, and it was by Anna Kramer. We probably should have picked it, but grief had shunted our powers of observation out of the way. Her mistake did not detract from Tolstoy’s words:

And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.

The wake, unlike the burial, went off smoothly. People still had ‘no words’, but there was alcohol, endless bottles of wine flowing from the four thousand-strong cellar Emma’s parents had accumulated. Normal conversation ensued, bringing a sense of familiarity back to the world. People stopped saying ‘there are no words’ and started wondering exactly what Hillary could have done differently in the recent presidential election, and how exactly Brexit was going to work. Sandwiches were consumed with no complaint. Unlike the reception, vegetarian options had been found for the wake. A little later, a friend of Emma’s parents came up to me as he was leaving.

‘It’s a terrible thing. But you spoke beautifully today.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You should read the Stoics. Seneca. It could be useful.’

He ambled off.

 

 

Seneca was a philosopher of the Stoic school who wound up as an adviser to Emperor Nero. Stoicism encourages a certain approach to life, including the resistance to being overcome or mastered by emotion, and the acceptance of whatever fate throws in one’s direction. Writing to his friend Lucilius in the final years of his life, Seneca makes several references to the process of grieving, but is alarmingly silent when it comes to sandwich options at funerals. On public mourning, he writes:

When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not excessive lamentation … In our tears we are trying to find means of proving we feel loss. We are not being governed by our grief but parading it. No one ever goes into mourning for the benefit merely of himself. Oh, the miserable folly of it all – that there should be an element of ostentation in grief!

In a later letter, he writes:

To lose someone you love is something you’ll regard as the hardest of all blows to bear, while all the time this will be as silly as crying because the leaves fall from the beautiful trees that add to the charm of your home … at one moment chance will carry off one of them, at another moment another; but the falling of the leaves is not difficult to bear, since they grow again, and it is no more hard to bear the loss of those whom you love and regard as brightening your existence; for even if they do not grow again they are replaced. ‘But their successors will never be quite the same.’ No, and neither will you. Every day, every hour sees a change in you, although the ravages of time are easier to see in others; in your own case they are far less obvious because to you they do not show. While other people are snatched away from us, we are being filched away surreptitiously from ourselves.

It was the last line that got me. Seneca would have been a lousy grief counsellor. Time was going to change me as I got further away from the point when Emma was still alive, and from the time when my grief was still raw. I would cease to be the person I was in those first two weeks after the first hour. But the person I became carried the bleak absurdities of those two weeks after the first hour.

 

Twenty-three months after the first hour, I was at another funeral.

An old school friend, Richard, had died. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumour about five years previously. His former classmates, many of whom had not seen him in years, had come to pay their final respects. The eulogies were given by three of them, those who had known him best. All started with tears and broken voices. Part of me was proud of my previous emotional control. Part of me was irritated. That is how you do public grieving, I thought. Good work all round. After the service we adjoined to the reception area, and I found myself next to Richard’s older brother Simon, whom I had spoken to at an old boys’ lunch a month or so previously. We shook hands.

‘I’m terribly sorry. It’s weird, we were talking about Richard a few weeks ago.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How are you holding up?’

‘Okay. Arranging this was difficult.’

He paused. ‘They do give you a lot of sandwich options for the reception, don’t they?’

‘Yeah.’

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‘Death and Sandwiches’ by Andrew Broertjes was commended in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize. 

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