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The phone rang. "Have you heard?" At "Riverbend" we live on the edge of Nelligen and hear nothing of what's going on in our small village. "No, I haven't!" "Heimo passed away last Wednesday!" Suddenly I felt cold. Time to light the fire.
It's now more than six years ago when Padma came back from the weekly craft meeting and announced, "You may be interested to know there's a new lady in our craft group whose husband is from Austria. They bought a house on Old Bolaro Mountain Road and moved here."
Of course, Austria is not Germany. Instead, it's that little country next to it where they speak German with a funny accent, but there were other similarities: Heimo had also arrived as a young migrant, although two years before me, and he had also been "processed" through the dreaded Bonegilla Migrant Centre, and so over several visits to their house and ours and quite a few glasses of wine slowly our friendship developed.
It was only a few weeks ago that we had lunch together at the Moruya Bowling Club and afterwards he had helped me to empty another bottle of red at home, and we had planned another get-together on the jetty as soon as the weather turned warm again. Padma hadn't gone to Wednesday's craft meeting but Heimo's wife Loraine had. When she returned home, Heimo was in bed having already breathed his last.
They say we should live every day as if it were our last; perhaps we should also treat every meeting as if it were our last which suggests we shouldn't be obsessed about trivial inconveniences or ruminate about small affronts to our ego. We should focus on what matters, and what matters is that we are in this together trying to find meaning in our life.
This has been a bad week because two in one week is two too many.
