My friend may have died, but I only have to remember her and she is there

At my father’s funeral, just after the casket was lowered into the ground, she hugged me so comfortingly that it spoke louder than words. In that moment of profound grief, she was the rock that kept me steady. Thirty years later I would be a pallbearer at her funeral.

On this day we walked the coffin down the aisle of the parish church, to the hearse that would deliver my friend to her final resting place.

Today is All Souls’ Day. A day to remember the dead. As I reflect, I remember and she is there. I met her in year 2 and from that point on we journeyed together through primary and secondary school. After year 12 we moved in and out of each other’s life but the bond we formed during those formative years could not be severed by time or distance.

A few bars of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is enough to bring memories of a deceased friend to the surface.

A love of music was one of the many things we had in common, and as was often the case she was the teacher and I, the student. Moonlight Sonata was one of her favourite pieces and she played it often. She would sit at the piano, music floating effortlessly from the keys. Beethoven’s music would speak powerfully without lyrics.

As I reflect, I remember and she is there.

In 2008 when I was teaching the novel Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy, I played Moonlight Sonata for my students who had never heard it before. It connected them powerfully to the novel. I wanted them to have the same mesmerising moment that I too had had when I first heard it all those years
before.

I was able to share with them, what I had learned from my friend about the great composer. As I reflect, I remember and she is there.

When someone close to us dies, we feel they are no longer with us, but if we look in unexpected places, we will find that their physical passing does not mean they have gone.

My friend lives on and I will find her everywhere. In our year 6 photo, wearing our dark blue uniform, our year 11 photo, wearing our grey tunic.

I will continue to find her in music and in the poems, Emily Dickinson’s Because I Could Not Stop for Death and Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, which we studied at school.

In novels and plays we read for English. Crime and Punishment, King Lear and The Go-Between. As I write, I remember and she is here.

Theologian John Cassian wrote: “The bond between friends cannot be broken by chance; no interval of time or space can destroy it. Not even death itself can part true friends.”

Gemma Di Bari is a Melbourne teacher and writer.

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