In Australia, on average one person dies every three minutes and eleven seconds. That’s around 452 per day. Hundreds of foreheads taking on the great, hard cold of death, where the skin seems absurdly thin over the smooth arc of the skull.

Sometimes, in dreams, I try to speak but can’t make myself understood. The words turn to nonsense in my mouth. The people listening frown politely. In the kitchen, I am asking the senior officer how to organise a cremation without using a funeral home. He is talking about the funeral he organised for his wife, at a restaurant. ‘But how do I get her to the cremation? Who do I call?’  He chuckles about the decorations they chose. I feel as though I’m speaking air, the words evaporating like steam.

I had called her twice as she lay stiffening on the lounge-room floor. She didn’t pick up. I had been annoyed. In hindsight she had a very good excuse. Seventy per cent of Australians say they would prefer to die at home. This is not the scenario people generally imagine.

Julie Walker, mother of the author (photograph by Sarah Walker)

After the initial terror, the conversation becomes horribly normal. We are just four people, drinking instant coffee in a suburban kitchen. The body on the carpet is some surreal glitch in the image. It is dense, somehow. It draws the eye. ‘How has it been for you guys, with the coronavirus?’ we ask. ‘Hasn’t affected us at all,’ they say. A pause. The older cop clears his throat. ‘Is there another room we could move to? It’s getting a bit smelly in here.’

She had been a nurse. When we were children, she refused to keep us home from school when we were ill. She was unflappable in the face of sickness. Her last job was at an IVF hospital. She would show me letters from women thanking her for her kindness, sending photos of the babies that cost so much money and fortitude. The staff on the ward seemed to get pregnant at an alarming rate. The patients would lie in recovery after endless rounds of useless, invasive procedures that failed to give them a child, and would stare at the swelling stomachs under the nurses’ scrubs with a desperate, naked longing.

The phone rings and rings. People ask, ‘What happened?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I tell them. Or they say, ‘Oh my god’, and I say, ‘I know, I know.’

A third of Australian funeral homes are run by a corporation that buys up family-run businesses, inflating prices and pushing one-size-fits-all funeral plans. The process is known as the McDonaldisation of funerals. In the dark, the floors still smelling of bleach, Mike watches me hunched over Google, calling companies with a high, tight voice. I find a local funeral home. They are not for profit and they use the proceeds to provide low-cost services to people below the poverty line. I feel a swell of hope. When I hang up, Mike looks questioningly at me. I burst into grateful tears. ‘They’re the ones,’ I say. ‘They’re the good ones.’

We make decisions. She had died alone. It seems important, somehow, for people to come to the house, to bring an offering of life as some cosmic apology for the isolation of her passing. The funeral will be in her backyard. There will be drinks and dogs and laughter. I find the scrap of paper on which she wrote out a handful of songs a decade before. We post an invite on Facebook, headed with a photograph I took of her. She is lying on the sofa, her hands buried in her dog’s soft fur. Her head is tipped back, roaring with laughter.

The world begins to shift. There is a charge in the air, a darting of eyes, the brittleness of people about to cry or shout. Supermarket shelves are emptied, exhumed. We clutch tiny bottles of hand sanitiser like talismans. My email inbox fills with cancellations. My diary becomes blank and bone-white. I blow fragments of eraser rubbings from the pages.

I pay for my brother and his girlfriend to fly home from London. They arrive bleary, red-eyed. We hold each other with grief and with joy. Without my realising it, he has become a man. I watch their friends file into our house, bringing food and booze and cigarettes and a VCR to play old home videos. They hug my brother and his girlfriend, pull one another so close.

Twelve hours later, the government passes laws that all returning travellers must self-isolate for fourteen days. ‘Lucky,’ people say. ‘Just made it.’ Now and then, someone coughs.

The telephone becomes the nexus of everything, the object through which the intangible, messy world comes to us. Friends call. They pour out sympathy, lament the distances between us. Inevitably, the conversation turns to the fear bubbling up like water through earth. I sit, throat tightening, making attentive noises as people gasp about the rising death tolls, the government response. The virus fills every gap in conversation, expands like putty into the pauses.

At the funeral home, we are greeted by a woman whose hair is carved into a perfect oval around her face. She holds out her hands. ‘We probably shouldn’t,’ we say. ‘I don’t care,’ she replies, and presses her palms to ours. When we leave, we rub sanitiser into our fingers and feel the air move cold over them until the alcohol evaporates.

I refresh the ABC, the Guardian, and Twitter over and over, looking for a sign. I watch the indoor gathering size shrink from 500 to 100. I become mouse-like, scuttling after my brother. ‘Should we cancel?’ I wonder. ‘I think we should cancel.’ He is steadfast, bullish. ‘I don’t think it’s ethical for us to hold this event,’ I say. ‘What if someone dies because they came here?’ He turns to me. ‘You’re worrying about hypotheticals. Our actual mum is actually dead. She’s dead. And everyone is forgetting about it already because of this virus. I want to have people here, actually here, to remember her.’ He was always her biggest supporter, her kindest crutch. He poured love into her through all the cracks, always, no matter how hard it was. I nod and bite back tears.

Artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge dies, age seventy. The captions on Instagram tributes all say the same thing: ‘Genesis has dropped h/er body.’ I like this phrasing, the way it frames the ill body as only tenuously housing the spirit. Ready at any point to be let fall, like clothing to the floor. It is the season of recognising the brittle hold we have on life. The incredible vulnerability of the body, the suddenness with which death arrives. We have all pictured dying surrounded by family, soft and gentle. We all come to understand that we may go abruptly, violently. That we may die alone.

The worst fears are on Twitter. Panic reigns. Every day I tell myself I won’t look. Every day I scroll and scroll and scroll.

Julie Walker, mother of the author (photograph by Sarah Walker)

My brother and I are alike: stubborn, efficient, decisive. We lace up sneakers and run along the foreshore, breathing life and pain into our bodies, watching the light shimmer on the water, the reflections scribbled and erased. We breathe hard. He goes further than me, opening blisters on the arches of his feet, bleeding into his socks. While I wait for him to return, I stand in the shadow of a weedy tree and call the coroner. People stroll past with ice cream. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I consent to you conducting an autopsy.’ Sweat beads behind my knees.

We write updates online: Please, if you’re feeling sick or scared, don’t come. We’ll record the speeches. We’ll meet again in a year. Messages of apology flood in, and we reply to each one: Thank you. You are doing the right thing.

Her iPad pings with group chat notifications. ‘What happened?’ someone asks. ‘Fell and hit her head.’ ‘How?’ ‘Dunno. I only know as much as you do.’ I wonder what my duty is to these people, what they are owed. My aunt tells my grandmother that it was a heart attack. It’s easier, comprehensible. She says she didn’t suffer. My grandmother has Alzheimer’s. They have to tell her again and again, until finally they write it down on her calendar: Julie died.

If it had been a week later, of course, we would have had to cancel. It would have been easier, somehow. The precision of it. The cool line of the law. Easy to follow. We are lucky, in a way. Lucky and terrified.

In the Bunnings carpark, I am rubbing hand sanitiser between my palms when I notice movement through a nearby windscreen. An older man is sitting in the driver’s seat, sanitising his hands. Our wrists twirl in the air, drying the alcohol from our fingers. Our eyes meet and we laugh, hold our hands up as if to say, isn’t it silly, what we need to do to be safe?

Rumours spread. A runner passing by could catch you in their slipstream. She had fallen from a ladder. Masks worked or didn’t work. She had been ill or she hadn’t been. Alcohol was involved, a little or a lot of it. Either way, soap and hot water did the most good.

I imagine charts showing the spread of the virus. I picture every person at the funeral seeing five other people, and five other people, and sickness reaching fingers through the country. I think, we cannot ethically say we are doing the right thing.

We lay out medical gloves and sanitiser made from tattooing supplies. The yard fills with people. An old family friend trailing Chanel No. 5 raises an arched brow and says, ‘You know, the elbow is the new erogenous zone.’ Some people say, ‘I don’t care about any virus, I’m going to hug you.’ Every time, I hold my breath as the arms cross me. Dogs circle and bark. We hover around my father, trying to keep people from touching him. ‘I can’t lose two parents in a month,’ I say, joking and not joking.

When I was an actor I could never cry on cue, couldn’t break down in front of an audience. We gather people under the corrugated plastic. I act as MC. I play the video I made when mum and I travelled to America. She hams it up for the camera. People call out, ‘That’s her! That’s so her!’ Laughter and sniffles ripple through the crowd. I think of the argument we had on our last night in New York, the hot anger that flooded through me as I stalked the Brooklyn streets. I say my piece and throw open the floor. ‘Does anyone have a speech burning in them? Step on up!’ We sanitise the microphone between speakers. I joke like a bad bingo host. There is an ache between my shoulder blades.

Midway through the speeches, I take a photo of the assembled crowd. I say it’s because I want to capture the view, of all these loved ones gathered to remember my mum. I don’t say it’s also so that I can count heads after the event, to gauge risk, heart in mouth.

After the eulogies, I am flooded with exhaustion. I stand in the backyard with a glass of wine, swaying slightly. A woman approaches me. ‘I live on the street,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know. I found out just now because I was walking my dog and someone asked if I was coming to the funeral.’ She glares at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It must have been a shock, to find out that way.’ ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It was. It was a shock. I’m very shocked.’ I say empty somethings. My head aches.

Later, one of my brother’s friends is drunk, glassy-eyed. He finds me in the backyard, the security light yellowing his skin. His mother died when he was a child. He is talking to me and using my mother’s name, but his eyes are elsewhere. He’s rambling, trying to be a guide, the one with eighteen years’ experience of grief. Despite his height, he is still eleven. ‘Watch The Lion King,’ he tells me. ‘The moment when Rafiki shows Simba his own reflection, tells him Mufasa is there.’ I nod. ‘They live in you,’ he says, sweat beading on his brow. ‘They live in you.’ He is talking to stay afloat now. I am so tired I’m seeing double. For a second, though, his eyes focus on me. ‘You might find it hard to breathe, because she’s in you now. You’re breathing her breaths, too.’

There is an official name for the pandemic: These Strange Times. Every message, every email. How are you doing, in these strange times?

The same neighbour turns up on our doorstep late on a Sunday night. ‘Has your brother been self-isolating for fourteen days?’ she asks. ‘No,’ we say, ‘he arrived back before it was compulsory. We’ve been monitoring everyone’s symptoms. We’re in lockdown now.’ She is indignant. ‘I work at a hospital!’ she exclaims. ‘My sister is extremely worried that I might have been exposed because of him.’ ‘Okay,’ we say. ‘Again, we did everything we could.’ She stares at us. ‘What do I do?’

I start having trouble breathing. My chest feels crushed. I wake in the night, hot-faced. I take my temperature obsessively. My head throbs.

The funeral director calls. ‘I have bad news,’ she says, spreading the vowels like kneaded bread. ‘We can’t do the viewing, and you can’t attend the cremation.’ I ask if she’s sure. I tell her my brother hasn’t seen his mother. She sounds strained. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.

I know it’s anxiety, not illness. It’s the same pressure I felt in January when the skies turned red, when smoke rolled in across the ocean. This is the year of contested breath. Still, I panic each time I inhale, listening for a wheeze.

The next day, the funeral director calls back. Everything is back on. I ask how she’s doing. She exhales. ‘It’s been chaos.’ She describes calling dozens of gutted families to tell them their cancelled funerals can go ahead. The way that good news becomes as hard as bad news, the way that change is the worst news of all.

Mum becomes reduced to a handful of narratives: Loved dogs. Loved a bevvie. Loved her friends. Terrible cook. She becomes small. You can hold the idea of her between cupped fingers. She becomes a handful. It is not the same type of handful she was when she was alive.

When we arrive for the viewing, the funeral director does not shake our hands. She directs us to several boxes of elbow-length, bright-blue medical examination gloves. We pull them on. We look like débutantes, ready for the ball. The room contains ten chairs, absurdly spaced. In the tiny coffin, Mum’s skin is slightly dewy, as though she has just broken a fever. My brain sees phantom breath lift her chest. I hadn’t expected the makeup. The foundation is good, leaving only a breath of the raw skin underneath. Her stumpy eyebrows, plucked to nothing over decades, are traced in, thick and full and arched. She looks, somehow, like an evil stepmother. The lipstick is applied beyond her natural lip line, fuller than she ever wore it. They’ve painted the tiny stubs of her nails. They have pinked her hands, and this of all things is the most false. Mum had terrible circulation. Even in summer, she wore gloves, would idly massage the sickly white knuckles to try to bring some life to them. We joked that she was practising dying from the fingers up. In the casket, her hands are plump and pink. This is how we know that she is dead.

I say the things you say – thank you and I’m sorry and how did you fit two babies inside your tiny body? – and then sit in an armchair in the waiting room and listen to my brother sobbing through the glass. He comes to fetch me, eyes shining. We stand and look down. ‘Little mama,’ he says. ‘She was so small.’ I show him the medical tape skating across her chest. We both admit to wondering what her eyes look like under the closed lids.

In the car going home, he asks, ‘What sort of weird art shit did you do to her? You cut some of her hair, didn’t you?’ I protest. I admit to having taken one photo. ‘I knew you’d do something,’ he says. ‘I knew you’d be doing some sort of weird voodoo shit.’

Every time my phone lights up, my stomach leaps with fear. I am waiting for the call that says, ‘I have it. I got it because of you. Nobody is safe.’

Going through her old things, I find a magazine from a hospital she’d worked at. There is an article about reducing the spread of infections in the wards. There is a photo of her, holding her hands under a soap dispenser. The caption reads: Nurse Julie Walker knows the importance of hand washing.

We sit in a glass-fronted viewing room at the cemetery, staring at the cremator. It looks like an industrial kitchen appliance: all pinch point warnings and emergency stop buttons. The staff have pulled in panels around it, almost hiding the other five units. We have scheduled an early morning cremation. The fees go up after eleven am. The panels are printed with a calming garden view, full of fountains. The staff, in high vis, open the door, and slide the coffin fast into the white-hot chamber beyond. They leave us in the viewing room for exactly fifteen minutes. A metal plinth holds sixteen plastic bottles of water.

My brother’s girlfriend fixes the cremator with a thick gaze. ‘This is very weird for me. Jews don’t do cremations.’ I nod. ‘Because of the thing where you have to be buried in the condition you were born, right?’ I ask. She hesitates. ‘Well, yes,’ she says. ‘There’s also, you know, the ovens.’

We watch the fire glow in the tiny window in the metal door and think about the Holocaust as my mother burns. No moment ever runs how you imagined it.

Mike and I arrive home. Inside, blowflies circle. I find a peace lily coated with fuzzy white growths, strands like cotton suffocating the leaves. I cut the stems, spray them with insecticides. The vegetables in my garden are infested. Tiny green caterpillars, aphids, snails, harlequin beetles. At first, the sad, desiccated leaves look still. As my eyes adjust, they teem with terrible life.

According to her bank balance, my mother is still living. Digitally, she straddles the space between worlds. A ghost paying direct debit bills, receiving earnest emails from dozens of businesses pledging how they will keep her safe from Covid-19.

I dream of her for the first time. We are in the front room of her house, drenched with sunlight. I am rubbing the belly of my dog as he squirms on the sofa. My mother is laughing, wrapped in a blue sarong. ‘You can come pat him,’ I say. She steps forward and stumbles on the hem of the fabric. She only just catches herself. In the dream I think, it is so easy to fall.

Every few days, a new phone call. A middle-aged woman, inevitably, asks, ‘Have you heard anything from the coroner?’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘it’ll take months.’ Always the same catch in the breath. The insistent fear: How did she die? Will I die that way, too? How scared should I be?

I sit on the back porch, under a sky strewn with stars. The air is cold and clean. Under my skin, pistons whir, pumping blood and air, pulling the world in and pushing it back out, running the mysterious processes that keep me alive.

In the supermarket, running along the river, hugging my brother: how scared should I be?

My chest gets heavier and heavier. We walk the dog on an overcast evening. A street away from home, I am swamped with dizziness. ‘I don’t feel good,’ I say, skin clammy, heart racing. There is a sensation of the world sinking, the ground sloping away. I take Valium and lie face-down on the bed as it unbraids the panic. All at once, the muscles in my chest and back unlock, like a clenched fist opening. I take three deep breaths and then burst into tears, hot, sudden, heavy. Mike rubs circles on my back. Four dark spots grow on the fitted sheet: two from my eyes, one from my nose, another from my mouth. I look up at Mike stupidly. ‘It’s hard when your mum dies,’ I say, and then I start crying again. The sound I am making is less like sobbing and more like a long, broken vowel. It is jagged and rough. Time passes. I lie there quietly, breathing, easy. In and out. For a moment, everything is still.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.