My father died suddenly and I’m still working my way through the half block of cheese that I rescued from his fridge. After a hastily organised funeral where I delivered a eulogy too long for the warm afternoon, he was cremated. My brother collected his ashes and his favourite T-shirt.
But his cheese lives on. Still in its torn packet, with one of Dad’s trademark purple elastic bands keeping it sealed, it has evolved into something other than food, and I refuse to imagine the meal when I finish it. My logic being that if it exists then so, somehow, does my dad.
I had barely arrived in Japan when a police officer phoned to tell me that he’d died.
Before ringing, officers had turned up at my flat, then at my brother’s house, to break the news gently. My children and I had just left a Buddhist temple dusted with snow, and they were busily negotiating our next destination.
One wanted to visit Kyoto market for lunch. And the other more op shops to hunt for more sneakers. Neither of them seemed to be winning and they looked to me to cast the deciding vote. Walking from the gift shop through the imposing temple gates, I played mediator, ignoring the phone ringing in my pocket.
But it kept ringing. Over and over until I pulled it out and, when I saw that it said no caller ID, I answered it. The man said his name quickly. All I remember now is the Tom part and that he was phoning from St Kilda police station.
It was the location that gave it away. Dad lived down the road. I knew instantly what the call meant. I started sinking, knees buckling, until my son, 16 and almost grown, scooped me up so I didn’t hit the ground.
Tom didn’t need to finish the sentence for me to understand. As he tried to explain what had happened, I began wailing and couldn’t make any sense of it. My children crowded me and I realised, horrified, that they didn’t know what had been said. And then I understood that I’d have to tell them. I’d have to tell everyone.
I whispered to them both, Boppa’s dead, using the name my daughter gave him all those years ago. They joined in the sobbing and we inched towards a park bench, huddled in a hug, as I listened for instructions. I had to find someone who would wait with Dad’s body until the undertaker arrived.
Tom told me to take his number just in case and I wrote it out on the only paper I could find. Unpacking days later in Melbourne, I found it scrawled on the back of the incense box I’d bought in the temple gift shop, when Dad was still alive in my world.
That night, after we took the train back to Osaka, I drank whisky in sharp little gulps until everything numbed, and walked the winter streets looking for food and a tattoo parlour where I could cover my skin with something that hurt. Fortunately, we didn’t find one, and instead filled our pockets with chocolate and chips from a 7-Eleven.
Two days later we flew home.
When we arrived in Melbourne, the phone rang endlessly, flowers appeared, meals were delivered and my brother and I shuffled through the days, unsure how to operate now there were no parents left. It was the third funeral I had organised in 12 years. The third eulogy I delivered. The third time grief sucked me under and spat me out.
But it was the first time someone had died when I hadn’t been watching.
After the funeral, my brother and I knew we had to turn our attention to Dad’s house. Tackling the kitchen first, I opened the fridge. The same fridge that had served our family of four for all those years.
With Dad living alone, it was under-utilised, so emptying it didn’t take long. I binned the wilting carrots, the greying cabbage, the milk edging past its use-by date, the medicines that should have been tossed long ago and a jar of pickles I recognised as one I’d given him. There were soy sauce fish from a takeaway meal and two square packets of wasabi no longer bright chemical green. On its own shelf was the half block of cheddar.
I called out to my brother to ask if he minded if I took it, saying it would save me buying some. He wandered out from whichever room he was lost in and shrugged. Take it, he said.
Depending on how many toasties we make, the block might do us for another month or so. And then it’ll be gone. Just like Dad.
• Nova Weetman is an award-winning children’s author
