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 jokes. 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.

Not now, I kept thinking. Not. Now. Everything couldn’t come exploding out of me now. Not in that room. Not while surrounded by the people who had lost the dearest member of their family. I would not want to obligate them to comfort me at a time like this. This was about them. Hold it the fuck together, Rosie.

Assunta and I finally reached the front of the line. We stepped forward, and I looked down at my soulmate, lying in his coffin.

Tony was dressed in a chequered suit, his hands folded neatly on his chest, holding a rosary. But it didn’t look like Tony. It just looked like a version of him. Like a wax figure. I reached down to touch his hand. The hand that had held mine since the day he met me. The hand that had kept me safe and made me brave. The hand that I wasn’t ready to let go.

It was hard. Like plastic. My fingers recoiled and I took a sharp breath in. I had expected the man lying in this coffin to just be Tony, but asleep. I thought he’d look like the man I woke up next to after we fell asleep watching movies, usually a pizza box between us. This wasn’t sleeping Tony. This was something else. That wasn’t the hand I remembered.

I thought maybe his face would be different, so I reached over and stroked his cheek. Again, my hand jerked back. His face felt the same as his hand. Cold. Hard. Like a doll. Just like a plastic doll.

My brain was reeling. Every nerve ending in my body was on fire. This wasn’t my best friend. This wasn’t my soulmate. This was a plastic doll in a chequered suit.

The lid was finally about to burst off my glass jar. I wasn’t sure I could do anything to stop it. But before it could happen, Assunta reached into the coffin and placed the bracelet next to Tony’s hands. It immediately slipped off and down the side of his body, and we both looked at each other, eyes wide, as it rattled against the side of the coffin as it slid all . . . the way down . . . to the bottom. It was a quiet room, and that bracelet slipping off Tony’s lap and into the coffin abyss might as well have been as loud as a marching band. I pursed my lips together, trying not to laugh. So did Assunta. Then, before I realised we had been moved on, we were walking towards the back of the room. Assunta asked if I wanted to stay and pray. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I really need to leave.’

I turned around, took one last look at Tony lying there in his chequered suit, and I walked out the door.

‘Oh my god, the bracelet!’ Assunta said, once we were in the car. We laughed and laughed, and talked about how much Tony would love that her gift to him was probably now wedged under his bum for eternity. I didn’t tell her that I was grateful it had happened when it did, because I was certain that just a moment before, my legs had been about to give out.

Everybody was going back to Tony’s house for dinner after the viewing, but I asked Assunta just to drop me back at the hotel with my sisters. I felt like I hadn’t taken a breath since the moment I had looked at Tony’s face, and laughing about the bracelet was only a temporary fix. Something big was coming. I could feel it.

Jacob, who had driven up from Melbourne, arrived while I was at the viewing, so we all decided to go to dinner together. We found some Italian restaurant down the road, and set ourselves up at a table big enough to fit other friends from drama school who were on their way. I still felt like I hadn’t taken a breath. I still felt tingles all over my body. I started just nodding or shaking my head when Jacob or one of my sisters tried to talk to me, like just pushing words out was going to be the thing that would make me explode. I sat at the table, listening to Rhiannon try and order something that Mohammed would eat, watching the families around me laugh and chat and enjoy each other’s company. I sat while Jacob tried to explain to an Italian waiter that he didn’t eat gluten or dairy or sugar or meat or onion or garlic. I sat there, in that crowded restaurant, and all I could see was a plastic doll in a chequered suit.

‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ I said, jumping out of my chair.

‘Are you okay, Rosie?’ Jacob asked.

‘I just need the bathroom,’ I snapped. ‘I’m just . . . The bathroom!’

I practically sprinted away from the table. I couldn’t breathe. I needed air.

The bathroom was three levels up, in the dark, closed mini-mall that the restaurant was connected to. I stood on each escalator, trembling, knowing that whatever had been bubbling under the surface was coming out now. Right now. The bathroom was locked, so I walked through the dark mall and found a bench outside an empty store. I sat down, clung to the wooden slats beneath my fingers and stared at the ground.

It was here.

I let out a guttural scream like nothing I had ever heard before. I didn’t know I could make a sound like that. I howled in anguish and struggled to breathe through my heaving sobs. Every spark of energy that had built up in my body since the day I found out Tony had died was now exploding out of me all at once. The lid had been blown off the glass jar, and the pain it released was hitting me like a freight train.

I screamed, I cried, I howled, I wailed. I sat alone on that bench in the dark, finally realising that Tony was gone. If I reached out my hand, he wouldn’t be there to hold it. Tony was dead. And I was alone.

Once I managed to get control over my body again, I started to make my way back down to the restaurant. The visceral and the emotional had finally clashed, and now I was supposed to go eat some garlic bread. I must have been gone a while, because by the time I got back to our table, the meals had arrived along with our other friends from drama school. I saw how I must have looked in their horrified expressions. Everyone at the table knew I must have just finally broken down. No one said a word about it. We had a nice dinner and went back to the hotel, ready for the funeral in the morning.

Rhiannon woke me up by asking what I wanted for breakfast. ‘Just a toasted sandwich or something,’ I replied, assuming she was going to one of the cafés downstairs. When she came back with McDonald’s for everyone else and a toasted sandwich for me, I lost it.

‘What the fuck? Why didn’t I get McDonald’s?’

‘Because you said you wanted a toasted sandwich!’

‘But that’s only because I didn’t know McDonald’s was an option! Have you ever known anyone to pick a shitty toasted sandwich over a fucking hashbrown? WHY WOULDN’T I WANT A HASHBROWN? And why wouldn’t you specify that you’re going to McDonald’s when you ask me what I want for breakfast? Why would you ask me what I want without using the word “McDonald’s” at any point? I’m not a fucking mind reader. How the fuck was I supposed to know that you were going to McDonald’s, and that I had the entire McDonald’s breakfast menu to choose from, which meant I never would have chosen a SHITTY FUCKING TOASTED SANDWICH?’

I may not have been in the healthiest of emotional states.

I also yelled at Tayla for how long she was taking in the shower and at Rhiannon again for not letting me use the GHD at the exact moment I required it. I was slightly on edge.

There had to have been over a thousand people at the funeral. Tony is the only person I know whose funeral needed bouncers. The church was standing room only, and a large hall next door with a live video stream was also full. Bouncers and a live video stream. Tony would have loved it. People who didn’t fit into the church or hall spilled out onto the front steps, then the footpath, then the road.

I took my seat next to Assunta, a few rows from the front. Jacob somehow hustled himself and my sisters into the back of the church. Just like the viewing, it went by in a blur for me. I do remember that it was a beautiful, traditional, Catholic service. Flowers from all over the world filled the church. Tony’s presence reached far and wide.

Assunta had been worried that she’d break down while reading her half of the eulogy, so I stood with my arm around her, ready to take over. But she nailed every word. As I stepped to the lectern to deliver my half, I saw Jacob, always a head above everybody else in the room, standing at the back of the church. We locked eyes. He smiled. I was so glad he had hustled his way in.

After the service, we made our way over to the cemetery. Hundreds of people gathered around Tony’s sky blue coffin, before three doves were released into the air. One dove stayed firmly on the ground, and kind of waddled slowly around in a circle. We called that the ‘Can’t Be Fucked Dove’. That would have been Tony’s favourite dove.

Everybody was handed a colourful balloon, and we all released them into the air simultaneously. I’ve never seen hundreds of balloons float into the sky like that before. They flock together like birds, moving wildly, but as a unit. (I’d probably never seen it because it’s illegal. Later, when speaking to Tony’s brother-in-law Bruno, he told me that the guy at the balloon shop had said that no more than twenty balloons can be released at any one time. ‘Mate,’ Bruno said, looking him dead in the eye and clearly not messing around, ‘we’re going to need three hundred.’)

As Tony’s coffin was lowered into the ground, his family gathered around the grave. I stepped back, but his nonna pulled me in close to her, and whispered to me, ‘He was your family, too.’

That his family found it within themselves to be so generous to me in their time of gut-wrenching sorrow . . . Well, that’s probably why Tony was so brilliant. He came from the best.

Later that day, there was a wake at Tony’s house. Grief filled the air, but Tony had been so spectacular, so full of life, that the kind of people he connected with were the kind who wanted to celebrate him just as much as mourn him. His drama-school friends mixed with his Italian aunties. His high-school friends swapped stories with his Melbourne friends. His cousins laughed with my sisters. My nephew played with his nephew (and they hated each other, which Tony would have found hilarious).

In the evening, we all sat at long tables in the marquee set up next to the house and ate pasta together, which had been lovingly prepared by the brilliant people in his family.

The night ended with all of us linking arms in a giant circle as we sang Tony’s favourite song, one all of us had heard him belt out at the top of his lungs at one time or another: ‘Part of Your World’ from The Little Mermaid. Tony’s mum sent my sisters and me back to the hotel with about three weeks’ worth of food, just in case we needed it before the morning. The best of the best.

The next day, I was driving back to my apartment in Melbourne, so I needed to say goodbye to my sisters and go with Jacob. We stopped off at Tony’s parents’ place to say goodbye, then we were on our way. As we pulled out of Griffith there was a storm in the distance, and the sky in front of us filled with countless rainbows, spreading across the vineyards as far as we could see. Neither of us acknowledged it. In fact, we didn’t talk the entire trip home. We just sang along to five different musical soundtracks, as well as the best of Christina Aguilera. Maybe it was because we were too emotionally exhausted, but that was all we needed to debrief.

As we pulled into Melbourne, I tried to take stock of the last couple of weeks. Okay, I thought. You had it. You had your breakdown. You cried on that bench and saw his coffin go into the ground. Now you have closure: you smashed the glass jar and let the pain out. Everything is going to be better after today.

The IV hooked up to my arm in the emergency room would beg to differ.

It’s Jaaaaack’s Suuuuuubwaaaaaay Tuuuuuuuuush.