One Year Today

Today marks one year since Hazel died.

Many people – almost everyone, I suppose – go through this: the death of a partner, a parent, a sibling, a child, or a friend.

At 66, I’ve lost both parents, two older brothers, and now my life partner, my de facto wife.

I look at the corner of the room where a year ago Hazel died, aged just 62, sitting upright in her office chair. I look at the space where we laid her down on the floor and we and then the paramedics performed CPR without success.

It was Hazel’s office, but it’s a music room now filled with a piano, five guitars, two amplifiers, two ukuleles, my father’s melodica, a didgeridoo, two harmonicas, maraccas, castanets, a rattle drum, a tin whistle, a pair of clapsticks, a recorder, bongo drums, and a 5 key kalimba.

I think she would approve, but sometimes I have to stop making musc, the tears are too much.

I sit at the dining room table, where two young uniformed police officers, and then two plains clothes detectives, and then the forensic photographer from the Coroner’s office interviewed me, variously gentle and concerned or brisk and detached, trying to establish with certainty that no foul play was involved.

I sit at the table on the back deck where the funeral director, then the executor of Hazel’s will, and then the lawyer handling Hazel’s estate talked me and my daughters through what would happen, what must happen, and what we wanted to have happen.

I think of the memorial celebration of Hazel’s life we held upstairs at the surf club instead of a funeral, 100 friends and relatives who came from across the street and across the country to bring their condolences, pay their respects, and express their sadness and their love.

They shared in our grief: the photos from all stages of her life, the 36 books Hazel worked on, the condolences book brought by her work colleagues, the recollections, memories and anecdotes of how they met Hazel, how they bonded with her, how they enjoyed her company, how they will miss her. They brought hugs, laughter, and tears.

I sit at my desk in the office we had made by enclosing our upstairs wrap around back verandah, looking down on the back yard where 20 years ago Hazel planted a small white mulberry sapling now spreading its huge canopy over the bottom of the yard, the apple tree that never bore more than tiny nuggets of fruit, the star jasmine with its elegant, pungent fragrance wafting up through my window, the garage that no longer houses Hazel’s car.

In the past year, I’ve done many of the things we’d long planned to do: replaced the ancient gas central heater with a more economical and climate-friendly one, installed a household solar battery, replaced the heat fan in the bathroom, hired an arborist to trim the trees in front and back and clean the leaves from the gutters, transplanted the agave attenuatas to even up how they frame the front porch, cleared the dangerously flammable undergrowth around and under the house, installed external security cameras, and reduced the mortgage. I still need to replace the taps in the downstairs bathroom, among other things.

All of these were on our household to-do list. Some were finally achieved because we no longer had to discuss how and when, I just did them. Others only became possible with the funds that came from Hazel’s superannuation and life insurance.

And this is how it will be from now on. With careful planning and budgeting, I can contiue to live in this house as I wish, surrounded by memories of Hazel in every room: our books, our music, our art. My daughters and I will at some stage go through Hazel’s personal possessions and sort what’s going to be bequeathed to them and what will be stored, sold, given to op shops or consigned to a council cleanup. There’s no hurry, none of us want to erase Hazel from our lives. At this time, Hazel’s estate is not even finally settled.

In some ways, a year is just an arbitrary marker of time, a scratch on a calendar, but it does carry weight, a signifier that we will all carry on, just without Hazel’s direct presence in our lives.

Photo credit: Hazel Flynn at the Gala Cinema, Warrawong © Sarah Moss, ABC Illawarra