Picture a little girl in long-ago Melbourne. I am seven, and staying in my grandmother's suburban house. On a stormy night. The rain is drumming on the iron roof, lightning flashes intermittently, and a tree branch taps against the veranda lace. I know that next door the elderly Salvationist is dying.
'He's very near the end,' the neighbours had declared that morning. Suddenly this is a terrifying thought. The darkness clings like a shroud; the tapping inexorably measures minutes and seconds. Panic sets in, and horror overwhelms. I wail and bawl, thrashing about in the double bed, burying my head in the huge kapocky pillow, smothering and sobbing by turns.
A crack of light shows under the door. It widens, and then Nana appears, clutching her dressing gown, her wispy pig-tail hanging down her back, her striped pyjama-legs flapping above her slippers. She is all concern. Whatever is it, dear? A bad dream?
And I gasp that I am worried about, sorry for, the old man next door.
She is sympathetic, but immediately assured and firm. But it's nothing, dear, really, to be afraid of. He's quite happy and contented. He knows is going to our Saviour, don't you see? He knows that this is not really an end, but the beginning of something better.
I eventually fall asleep, comforted but not necessarily convinced.
My only concern with the old man's death, I know now, and surely felt then, was that it forced on me an appalled recognition of an end. For the first time I felt the dreadful dislocation of being only a speck in the universe, felt the grim sadness of brevity, of human limitation.
*****
The day my father died I was on a Greek beach. Such June days are among my favourites, for the crowds of high summer have yet to arrive. The days are balmy, a prelude to the real and scorching heat; the sea seems like a bolt of blue silk, just lightly shirred. On that day a couple of my favourite people were at the beach, too. Friends from England.
It seems strange now, but I don't suppose it was, really. That morning one friend and I had been discussing death. We told each other once again that the