Page 139 of Here One Moment

We had Ned’s funeral in Sydney.

“I guess it’s more convenient, he’s already here,” I said to Hazel, and then I laughed, and couldn’t stop laughing, and poor sweet Hazel didn’t know if she should call a doctor.

Nobody expected it. He was so fit and healthy, to pass away of a heart attack while he napped just did not seem like something Ned would do.

Do you know what I did the day Ned died? I called my ex-husband, David. Isn’t that peculiar? I don’t know exactly what I wanted from him, but I seemed to need to tell him all about Ned, as if, because heart attacks were David’s field of expertise, he could offer a solution; he would find a way to give Ned a different ending. He seemed to understand. He told me half of all cardiac deaths occur in people with no history or symptoms. He said the cardiologist might have saved Ned, but not necessarily. Ned’s EKG might have been normal and he might have told him to book in for a stress test and angiogram after his holiday, or, yes, he might have told Ned not to get on that plane. He said he didn’t think an Apple Watch would have saved his life. He said, “I’m so very sorry, Cherry.”

The morning of the funeral I looked at our river cruise itinerary. That day we had a choice of two full-day excursions: Salzburg or Ceský Krumlov, a medieval town with Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture. I think we would have chosen the latter as we had already been to Salzburg. It’s funny how the mind works, how I kept thinking about which excursion we would have chosen, as if it mattered.

It was a big funeral. Many of Ned’s former students attended, including people in their fifties who Ned had taught more than thirty years ago. One man, who’d been in one of Ned’s classes when we lived in the UK, flew all the way to Australia for the funeral. I said, “Oh, goodness, that wasn’t necessary.” Rude of me. He said, so sincerely, “It was necessary because Mr. Lockwood changed my life.” And then, well, I felt so proud of Ned, I couldn’t stop crying. It was very embarrassing.

I kept looking about for Jill and Bert, and then remembering. I thought I could get through this if I had them by my side, and then I thought I could get through their loss if Ned and I were grieving them together.

But I could not get through all their losses on my own.

I thought: What did I do to deserve these tragedies? This is too much. This is grossly unfair.

I still think that, sometimes, even though I know full well I am exemplifying the just-world fallacy, which is the erroneous belief that the world is fair. We are socialized to think that. It makes the world feel more predictable if we believe good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished. The problem is that we then subconsciously believe people who suffer must deserve it. It’s what allows us to look away, to turn the television off. People sometimes say that everything happens for a reason. No. No, it does not. There was no reason for these terrible things to happen together. No reason at all. They just did.

There was a big funeral in Hobart for Jill and Bert. I did not attend. It was the day after Ned’s funeral and I was still in Sydney with Hazel and Ned’s brother, Tony.

Jill and Bert’s middle daughter, the one they called “our smart one” because she was a lawyer, wrote a lovely sympathy card saying Ned had meant the world to her parents. I wrote and said Jill and Bert talked about her and her siblings and their new grandchild all the time, which was certainly true; sometimes we had to quite forcibly change the subject.

I went home after a week. I sold the house. I did an enormous clean-out and gave away all of Ned’s clothes to a local charity shop, as well as my first wedding dress, which I had pointlessly been keeping all these years. (For my second wedding, the one that mattered, the one to Ned, I just wore a nice blue sheath dress, which I wore to death and eventually threw away.)

I bought this house in Battery Point, sight unseen, from a buyer keen on a fast sale, and then I thought: Right. Let’s get this grief thing done. You’ve done it before. Do it again.

But experience makes no difference; you cannot project-manage grief.

I remembered how Mum and Grandma and Auntie Pat took care of me when I lost Jack. I took myself for long walks. I ran myself baths. Sometimes I ran a bath, sighed, and then pulled out the plug without getting in. I couldn’t rub my own back, so I booked myself in for a massage, but goodness, that was a mistake. I sobbed so hard I thought I’d be sick. So embarrassing. They didn’t want me to pay, but I insisted.

I remembered how Number 96 had been such a good distraction so I tried to find a new series, but it made me miss Ned too much. We loved so many series. “I wonder how Jackie is doing?” said Ned once, and I thought, Who do we know called Jackie? He meant Nurse Jackie.

I woke up crying, I went to bed crying, I cleaned my teeth crying. There were some days when the pain was so physical, I felt like I was being squeezed to death in some kind of medieval torture device. Then there were some days, normally after a big crying day, when I felt nothing at all, like I was fading slowly away.

Ivy kept calling from America, but I didn’t return her calls. She didn’t give up. She kept leaving messages, which was nice of her.

I know I didn’t drink enough water during this time and I take responsibility for that.

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It is a strange experience leaving on holiday with your husband and returning with his ashes in a Styrofoam box. I didn’t pay for the fancy gold urn. I didn’t see the point. The plan was to scatter the ashes somewhere meaningful, but I couldn’t think of the right place. We had led such nomadic lives. Then Tony emailed and suggested a scenic lookout on the New South Wales south coast near the caravan park where he and Ned used to stay as children on summer holidays. I know Ned had (relatively) fond memories of those holidays. (He said he was often bored out of his mind, but Ned was easily bored.) So I agreed to fly to Sydney with the ashes and we set a date after Easter.

Hazel wanted me to spend Easter with them, but I said no thank you. I had plenty to do. When someone dies there is a mountain of paperwork. I was ruthless with it. “My husband has died,” I said coldly to various people in call centers, and I cut them right off when they offered condolences. “This is what I need you to do.”

However, I had great difficulty canceling Ned’s gym membership. They kept insisting the member needed to personally come into the gym. That was their “procedure.” When I patiently explained why this was literally impossible, they would promise to “look into it” and “get back to me,” but they never did, and they continued to charge membership fees to our credit card, and I got testier and testier each time I called and had to go through the whole rigmarole again.

The day before the flight I talked to yet another cheerful dimwit. “The member needs to come in personally to cancel their membership,” he said. “It’s right there in the terms and conditions.”

I lost patience. I grabbed the Styrofoam box. I drove to the gym, muttering like a madwoman the whole way.

“Here he is!” I shouted, and I slammed the box on the counter.

“I beg your pardon?” said the young receptionist.

I’m ashamed to say I shook the Styrofoam box in her face. “He’s here to cancel his membership! As per procedure!”

She peered at the box and then she saw the small gold plaque on the lid: Edward Patrick Lockwood.

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