The Ring

Mum's ring doesn't fit me. It never did. She had thin fingers, piano fingers she called them though she never played, and mine are my dad's, thick and practical. So I wear it on my little finger, which she'd have said looked ridiculous, and she'd have been right. I put it on this morning without deciding to. I was making coffee and it was on the windowsill where I keep it and it was on my hand and I was standing in the kitchen at six with the birds going mad outside, the way they do in Brisbane in September, and I thought: a year. A year today. People tell you the first year is the hardest. I don't know if that's true yet. Ask me next year. What I can tell you is the first year is the loudest. Everything's a first. First Christmas, first birthday, hers and mine. First time I reached for the phone to tell her something and got as far as her name in my contacts. First time I didn't reach for the phone, and noticed I hadn't, and that was almost worse. My sister's coming over at ten. We're going to the cemetery and then we're going to the RSL, which was Mum's idea of a good day out, and we'll have the schnitzel and we'll say things like "she'd have loved this" and we won't cry, probably, because we did all of that in the first three months and now there's this other thing that's not crying but isn't not crying either. A kind of weather. I've been going to a group. Tuesdays, a church hall in Annerley, eight or nine of us and a woman called Denise who lost her husband four years ago and runs it because nobody else would. First time I went I sat in my car outside for a full twenty minutes. Second time, ten. Now I just go in. The thing about the group is nobody says anything useful. That's what I'd tell someone who was thinking about it. Nobody has an answer. There's a man there, Reg, who lost his wife of fifty-one years, and he said the second week, "I still make two cups of tea. Every morning. I pour one down the sink." And the room just sat with that. Nobody said "oh, you should stop that." Nobody said "that's beautiful." It was just true, and it was in the room, and that was the whole point.

I've made two cups of tea. I'll admit that. Not every morning. Some. Mum was not a saint, I want to be clear about that. She was difficult and she was funny and she was wrong about a lot of things and she'd have hated this, me writing about her, she'd have said "put that away and do something useful." She held grudges like they were pets. She loved me in a way that was sometimes hard to be on the receiving end of. I miss all of it. Not the edited version. All of it. Six-thirty now. The coffee's gone cold because I've been standing here. The ring's on my little finger looking ridiculous, and I'm going to leave it there for the day, and when my sister sees it she'll say "that doesn't fit you," and I'll say "I know," and we'll both know what we're actually talking about. The birds are still at it. She used to complain about the birds. Every single morning, sixty years in this city, and every morning surprised by them. "Would you listen to that," she'd say, like they'd only just started. I'm listening.