The death of a parent is a kind of privilege. What’s the alternative, after all? Your parent loses you. If your parent dies, they have maintained the natural order. They have forestalled the worst of griefs. When my mother died suddenly in 2017, I remember thinking very clearly: I’m so glad her mother died first. Grief for a parent is a grief we can speak, can pattern, can fit neatly into the progress of our lives.

It’s still grief, though. I couldn’t even cry until I saw her body because I just couldn’t understand what I was being told. It’s a loss of your last reserves of childhood, your last place of retreat. When you have babies, people ask if your mother is over the moon and how she is going to help. When you get married, people ask what your mother is going to wear, advise on the little tasks she can take over. (They ask about your father, too. My father is estranged, which is another story that I have never spoken about publicly. He’s never met my kids.) When I was about the same age my daughter is now, I remember soberly telling my mother that I really loved plums, and she said she knew, and smiled, and stroked my face in a way that said my love for plums was the sweetest thing in the world to her. There’s no one else who feels that way about me, who cares about me and plums in that same way. Don’t get me wrong – I’m OK. I have friends and family and my children and my husband. I’m talking about the death of my mother, my last and only parent, as the death of an aspect of myself that was once cherished in a very particular way. I’m not a child to anyone anymore.

Is grief self-involved? Maybe. Sadness is, as a rule, and I’m someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time sad, like chemically wrong in the head sad. I remember feeling a terrible fear of time passing after Mum died, like the more time passed, the more her death would retreat into insignificance, the more life would pick up and go on without her. And I find, now, as the years go on, my sadness is more for her than for myself. I am OK, but she isn’t. And the more time passes, the more babies are born, the more things happen, the more Christmasses and joys and sorrows and conversations about gardening and beaches walked along, the more she has lost. The sum of our lives is beyond her now.

She was an immigrant, and she was brought here as a baby on a ship. Days before her death, she returned home from a visit to the country of her birth. When you live somewhere other than where you were born, every return is a going away, and every coming home is a leaving. This time, it was like the very structures of her cells rebelled at being removed from the place where she was born. She got home, and she dropped down dead. We scattered half her ashes in the water off a beach here in southern Tasmania.

Her own father had died on those waters. Forty or fifty years ago, he was out on the boat with his wife, my grandmother, and suddenly he furled the sails and started the motor and then lay down and died. My grandmother didn’t have the strength or knowledge to sail the boat alone, but with the sails furled and the motor on, she could point the boat for shore and run it aground. As she did this, their dog, Brutus, lay down on my grandfather’s chest. His last breath was pressed from his lungs – an unkind moment of false hope. After he died, my mother, a young woman, moved back in with my grandmother on the farm. She would often take herself off to this specific beach. This is where we scattered half her ashes. My younger brother took the other half in a jar back again to the country of her birth and scattered them in the water there. We have disjointed her, but I have a genuine, maybe superstitious, feeling her ashes will be drawn back together like iron filings to a magnet. Water circulates, after all.

When my mother died, I was thirty and didn’t have any plans for children. Only a month or two later, I discovered I was pregnant. Physics tells us that nature abhors a vacuum. Motherless, I came to be a mother, one day also to be lost.

I saw my mother for a long time after she died. I would see her out windows, or in the corner of my eye. Always in the periphery, always a dim blur, but unmistakably my mother, the herness skating through every line and flicker.