‘Mike, I’m so sorry! I shouldn’t have ended it! I’m an idiot! I don’t care, just come home!’
I thought he’d be relieved and come back straight away. Not exactly.
‘I’m sorry, Rosie,’ he said. ‘You really let me down. I needed you to comfort me last night and you asked me to leave. And tonight you break up with me? I never thought you would be like this. You were right. I can’t be with you. It’s over.’
What?
The next half an hour was a very sorry display that anybody who has ever been dumped will understand. I cried. I pleaded. I reasoned. Nothing worked. I took responsibility for everything that had gone wrong and apologised. I had been so selfish. I could do better. I had freaked out momentarily but I would never let him down again.
I was begging him not to leave me. Finally, he had that upper hand he had been so uncomfortable without. I didn’t realise that this was exactly how he had wanted this to turn out.
‘Look, maybe I can come over tomorrow, it depends how I’m feeling,’ he said. ‘But I can’t promise anything. I just feel so betrayed.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ I cried into the phone. I was desperate not to be alone, and my survival instincts had kicked in. I was completely blind to his faults. Exactly like it had been with my parents when I was younger. Having them around, no matter how bad they were, was better than not having them at all.
He spent the next few weeks coming to my house, alluding to a possible reconciliation, having sex with me, then leaving. He had complete control. He would get back together with me for a day, then change his mind in the morning. He told me he loved me and wanted to be with me, the night before a friend’s wedding, then texted me when he knew I’d be at the reception and broke it off again. At one point, he told me he couldn’t be with me, while he was actually inside me. Always because he just couldn’t get over my ‘betrayal’. He needed someone he could rely on, someone who hadn’t been so selfish.
I was broken. Exhausted. Anxious. I could hardly work. I couldn’t sleep. I was barely eating. I just didn’t trust my instincts anymore. I felt like I was in a dark room, and only he controlled when I could see light. But when the light shone though, nothing made sense. I had lost myself.
Funnily enough, during this period of total emotional annihilation, he stopped being resentful about my career. I suppose there was nothing to resent anymore, since he no longer considered me the more ‘valuable’ person in our relationship. Keeping me hanging had put him back on top, just the way he had once told me he liked it.
But, in the end, it wasn’t the emotional abuse that snapped me out of it; I was too broken for that. It was his drinking. It wasn’t until I looked at him, crying on the step outside my house, lying face down on the concrete like a toddler and refusing to get up, that I finally realised I had been dating someone exactly like my dad. The mental-health stuff, the moodiness, the uneasiness in the pit of my stomach – that had all been familiar to me. Those had all been warnings. But something about seeing Mike on the ground, drunkenly raving . . . Something about how pathetic that was finally made my brain wake up. It finally clicked: Rosie, you have ended up with the person you said you would never end up with. This is not the man for you. I kicked my way out of the dark room and found my own damn light.
Still face down on the concrete, he was talking about wanting to kill himself again, so I called a close friend of his to come and pick him up. It took this guy twenty minutes just to coax him off my front step. Mike was ranting incoherently, falling as he tried to walk. And I just wanted him to be as far away from me as possible. It was like a blindfold had been pulled off my face. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen it before.
Then he left, and I never saw him again.
Ha.
I saw him one more time. When I went looking for him at 10pm and found him passed out in the gutter. I really hadn’t wanted to see him again, but he did not sound good on the phone. My childhood instincts kicked in: always go and find the drunk person.
‘Rosie! You came! You came and found me!’ he slurred, when I woke him up. ‘You’re my hero. I love you, Rosie. You know I love you.’
I took him back to my place, and he started talking about wanting to get back together. He had become so used to me begging him, and gratefully accepting any emotional scrap he threw at me, that he did not like it when I said no. First he picked a fight with me. He got really nasty. He told me I was a fraud, because my first book was going to be about my difficult childhood, but he knew that my uncle had sent me to a private boarding school when I turned fifteen.
‘How fucking hard could it have been? You went to a better school than me! You’re so full of shit, Rosie.’
I knew that he was drunk. I knew that he was desperate. I knew he was trying to get a reaction out of me. He got one.
‘Well you know what?’ I screamed. ‘You are a TERRIBLE FUCKING WRITER. You haven’t been unlucky – people just don’t want to read your work BECAUSE IT’S SHIT.’
He stared at me. I stared right back at him. Then he burst into tears, grabbed a massive knife from the kitchen and locked himself in the bathroom. He was wailing and screaming, threatening to kill himself, so I called Triple Zero.
He must have heard me on the phone, because the bathroom went quiet. Then I heard the door unlock, and he came running towards me. He pushed me up against the inside of the front door and held the knife up to my face. ‘I will fucking use this, Rosie. I’ll use it.’
‘Is that him?’ the woman on the line asked.
‘Um, yes,’ I stammered. ‘He, ah, he has a knife. I mean, he said he wants to use it. I think he just means on himself, though. Um, let me call you back.’ I hung up the phone.
‘Rosie, let me out of this fucking house. Just let me go so I can throw myself in front of a car.’
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to let him out if he was going to hurt himself. He’d also just held a knife up to my face. I didn’t think he meant he wanted to use it on me. I did think he meant himself. He was drunk, and not making a lot of sense. My brain had a million thoughts and no thoughts at the same time. Like it had short-circuited. I opened the door and let him out. Then my phone rang.
‘Rosie, is that you?’ It was the same operator.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I hung up, I just . . . Um . . .’
‘You can’t hang up again, Rosie. Where is he now? Is he in the house?’
‘No, I let him out of the house. He said he wanted to leave.’
‘Because you mentioned he had a weapon, Rosie, I had to send police officers. Stay on the line with me until they get there.’
Police? What? Had I actually turned into the girl who needs to have police remove a guy from her house? After everything I had been through as a child, after everything I had seen, how could I be so stupid? How could I have ended up in the kind of stressful domestic situation I had promised myself I’d never return to? How could I have ended up with someone like my dad?
The police were there within about two minutes. Mike hadn’t gone and thrown himself in front of a car. He was hiding down the side of my apartment building, crying. The police grabbed him and slammed him up against a wall. I immediately felt guilty – they were looking for a ‘weapon’ because I had told the woman on the phone he had one. But I didn’t mean for him to sound threatening. I just wanted . . . I don’t know what I wanted. I just didn’t want it to be my problem anymore.
I assured the police that he hadn’t threatened to harm me, just himself. I told them that he was incredibly mentally unwell, had been for some time, and I thought he needed to be hospitalised. They called for an ambulance.
He was taken to sit in the back of it as soon as it parked out the front. I asked them to wait, since I had called Mike’s good friend again, and he was on his way. I waited in my living room, just desperate for the whole thing to be over. I got a call on my phone from a private number. I thought it might be Mike’s friend so I answere
d. It was Mike. He was calling from the back of the ambulance parked out the front.
‘I really don’t want to be talking to you,’ I said, annoyed that I’d been tricked into picking up a call from him.
‘They’re taking me away,’ he said.
‘You’ll just go to the ER, then they’ll let you out,’ I replied. ‘But Mike, you have to be honest with them about how you’ve been feeling. You really need help.’
‘I’m fine, Rosie.’
And that was it. The police asked me if I wanted to press charges, but I said no. I just really wanted him to get help. He was narcissistic, emotionally abusive, and not even close to being as talented as Robin Williams. But I just really wanted him to get help.
I hope he got it.
The car trip to Griffith the day before Tony’s funeral was actually kind of . . . fun. My older sister Rhiannon, my younger sister Tayla, and Rhiannon’s two kids, Allira and Mohammed, were crammed into the car. Mohammed was only three, so I sat in the back next to him and let him watch movies on my laptop. I thought about working on the eulogy, but knew there was no point. Whatever I had written in that thing, it had taken a miracle for my brain to get it on the page. There was no way I was going to manage anything else.
We stopped at Maccas on the way, and laughed and told stories the way people are forced to only when stuck in a car together for eight hours. Mo and I watched The Little Mermaid, and I tried not to think about the fact I would be seeing Tony’s body before I went to bed that night.
I’d never seen a dead body before. When my dad died, when I was eight, I had tentatively asked my mum if we could see him in the coffin.
She seemed taken aback. ‘Is that something you want to do?’ she asked me. I felt like I had asked something wrong. She seemed . . . disturbed.
‘No,’ I quickly blurted out. ‘No, I don’t want to.’
Years later, when my grandma died, the whole family was taken to a small waiting room before the funeral service. There was a door off to the side, which someone mentioned was the entrance to ‘the viewing room’. I knew what that meant. I did not want to go into that room. I was the only one who felt that way. At thirteen, I may have been young, but even six-year-old Tayla was brave enough to go in. The entire family went in together, so I just sat there alone, waiting for them to finish ‘viewing’ on the other side of the door.
Tayla came bursting out of the room approximately eight seconds after she had gone in. The look on her face made me realise I’d made the right decision. She looked confused, bewildered and a little terrified. She handled it so well, though. After hurriedly coming out of that room, she just quietly walked over to the chair next to me, sat on it, and didn’t say a word as we waited for everyone else to come out. She must have been busting to talk about what she’d just seen, but even at six years old, she sensed this was a moment for respectful silence.
I’ve always been glad that I didn’t go into that room, because I didn’t want that to be the last memory I had of my grandma. I knew if I saw her that way, I’d never be able to think of her without thinking of her inside that viewing room. And the last memory I had of her was pretty great. My grandma was a very stylish lady – she was getting her hair coloured and washed and blow-dried until the day she died. I went to stay with her and Grandpa for a couple of days once, and she had to take me to the salon to get my hair washed, because she actually just didn’t keep shampoo anywhere in the house. I don’t think she’d washed her own hair since the 1960s.
She was dressed immaculately every day, and she loved buying clothes for my sisters and me. She was a little judgemental, but always delivered with the right amount of posh sass so that it was charming. Towards the end, when it looked like she only had days left, my mum took us to the hospital to see her. I’ll never forget the last thing she said to me. She gestured for me to lean in close to her, and dramatically pulled off her oxygen mask, like she had something very important to say. I bent down as close to her face as I could get, ready to take in whatever departing life wisdom she had to offer me.
‘That’s a nice top,’ she said. ‘Since when are you so stylish?’
‘You bought this for me, Nanna!’ I replied.
‘Well,’ she said, putting her mask back on. ‘That explains it.’
I knew I didn’t want to see Tony’s body, but something in me felt like I had to. Because he was overseas when he died, I almost felt like I would never believe it unless I saw the ultimate proof. Like I’d always, somewhere in the back of my mind, hope or imagine that he was still travelling somewhere. That it was all a mistake and he’d make his way home. I couldn’t go on living like that. I needed to see him.
As we got closer and closer to Griffith, I started wondering when and if I was going to cry, which I still hadn’t really done since Tony had died. I had shed some tears, but not even come close to breaking down yet. And I wanted to. I could still see all my pain just sitting there in the glass jar, and I wanted it out. I needed the lid to come completely off, before the fear of it coming off drove me crazy.
Would it happen when I saw Tony’s parents? His sister? His nieces and nephews? Maybe when I saw Tony? Or tomorrow at the funeral. Or when I was trying to read his eulogy with Assunta. I wish I knew when the explosion was going to come.
Tony’s Italian family are very proud Catholics, which meant death was handled in a certain way that my sisters and I had never experienced. Every funeral I’d ever been to was a small service, followed by a sensible reception, ending with everybody going home to their own houses.
That is not how things are done in the incredibly loving and supportive Griffith Italian community. First of all, the entire family – that’s extended family – converged on Tony’s parents’ house, a little place on a farm on the outskirts of Griffith, where Tony spent his childhood.
The extended family formed a support circle around Tony’s parents. They took turns sleeping there, they cooked, they cleaned, they built a marquee next to the house so everybody could sit down to meals together. The family split into two rooms in the house – the men in one room grieving with Pat, Tony’s dad, and the women in another room, grieving with Maria, Tony’s mother. They all wore black, and in the centre of the room was a shrine to Tony, covered in photos and rosaries and mementos. Sarina, Tony’s sister, told me that after the funeral, this arrangement would stay in place for at least a month. Tony’s immediate family needed to grieve, so his extended family would take care of everything else. The support circle was breathtakingly beautiful in its love.
My heart started to beat faster as my sisters and I pulled up to Tony’s house. His best friend Assunta met at us the end of the dirt driveway. We hugged and laughed and commented on how neither of us could believe the whole thing. She seemed jittery, agitated. Looked like I wasn’t the only one keeping a lid on their glass jar.
I went inside. In the living room, all the women in Tony’s family were sitting around his shrine, holding hands, with his mother Maria in the centre. She looked up. We locked eyes. I’ve never seen so much sorrow on a person’s face. She jumped up out of her chair and threw her arms around me. We stayed locked in that position for a long time. I wish I could remember what I said. What she said. But I just remember her embrace: equal parts generous in its comfort and heartbreaking in its anguish. I didn’t want to let go. My sisters and I talked with the rest of the family, making awkward introductions with people we’d never met – like ‘Hi! It’s so lovely to meet you! Except, you know, Tony’s dead and nobody’s heart will ever get over the pain and emptiness we’re feeling right now. But I’ve heard so much about you!’
It went by in such a blur, by the time we left I didn’t even realise that I still hadn’t cried.
Assunta came back to our hotel with us, because she and I were going to drive over to the viewing together. We went up to our room, hung out with the kids, joked about how bizarre everything was. She and I seemed to be handling things the same way: block all feelings. Make j
okes. Get jobs done. Concentrate on details. We talked about the eulogy I had sent through, which she and Sarina had loved, although at that point I couldn’t remember what the hell was in it.
Then it was time to go. Time to go and see the body. Time to go and see Tony’s dead body. How the fuck was this actually happening?
We kept talking in the car on the way over to the funeral home. I asked her what to expect, and explained what it had been like with my grandma.
‘Wow,’ she said, laughing. ‘This is nothing like that.’
She explained that Tony would be at the front of a large room filled with chairs. It was tradition for everybody to come and see the body. People line up, she said, and once they’ve had their turn walking past the coffin, they go and sit in the chairs and pray. The line is usually long, and would definitely be really long for Tony.
The only clear memory I have of the next half an hour is Tony’s face. The rest is . . . fuzzy with insignificance. We arrived at the funeral home. We parked the car, which just seemed like a bizarrely normal thing to do. The line was already out the door. We joined it, along with Tony’s closest cousins. We chatted as we inched forward, waiting for our turn. We got inside the room. I saw the coffin. I saw the outline of Tony’s face. I spun around and faced the other direction.
‘I saw him,’ I said to Assunta. ‘I shouldn’t have looked. I saw him.’
I could feel my lid coming off. I’d never had so much adrenalin coursing through every inch of my body. Every pore on my skin was tingling. Every hair standing on end. The line inched forward.
Assunta put her arm around me. I could tell from her face that her lid was close to coming off too. The line inched forward.
Assunta told me she had a bracelet that she wanted to put in the coffin with Tony. I panicked that I hadn’t thought to bring anything. The line inched forward.
I could see Tony’s parents, sitting in the front row, right beside his coffin. I caught another glimpse of him. My heart jumped. My mouth went dry. The line inched forward.
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