After someone close to you dies there are things you expect to miss and there are things that catch you completely unawares.
Be forewarned about birthdays, family gatherings, and anniversaries. They all wound, the first year is the worst. Even now, in the fifth year, occasions can wrap me in a shroud of melancholia. Anticipated, and marginally less debilitating year to year.
It was the unexpected things knocked me over when I, eventually and tentatively, returned to a work-as-usual-as-it-could-be-after-the-death-of-Mottsu mode.
To facilitate a smooth re-entry to corporate life, and avoiding anything too familiar that might trigger blubbering despair, I spent a couple of days working interstate. I worked, or more accurately, I sat, inanimate and sphinx-like at a desk, under the guardianship of a trusted colleague. Transported, stupefied, back into an office environ.
It was early winter with short days. I recall standing on a street corner at the end of the day, between the office and my hotel, waiting to cross. It was the gloaming, the mystical transition time between day and evening.
Waiting for the lights to change, I reached into my bag and fished out my phone. Habit. As the phone powered up, I was struck by the realisation that he would not have rung, there would be no message and I had no-one to call with nothing to say.
Weeks after Mottsu died, I realised he would never ring me again. He was dead, I knew he wasn’t going to call. Honestly, how could I not have known that?
Mottsu was never going to call me nor would he ever answer the phone. The thought had never entered my heart and I was whacked by that realisation. Clopped by a full body blow. I’m unsure what a full body blow is but it sounds debilitating. On the corner of Macquarie and Argyle streets I crumpled (debilitated) and reached a hand out to steady against a pole. Panting not breathing.
When travelling for work, it is in the gloaming that you call home. Everyone does. Everyone except me now. It is a lonely time with no-one to call. The gloaming call is a purposeless call, it is a check-in at the end of the day to hear news of home, to be reassured of what you know: that all is well.
Don’t phone a friend, don’t try a substitute. I tried, and that experience is worse than making a phone call to your waiting answering machine in your empty house…
The frozen loneliness that emerges at the end of a day in the office can’t be thawed by a well meaning friend. The sensible thing to do is plunge into a civilised gin and tonic, garnished with a lime slice. Sigh, breathe and gulp.