Dad will love this photo, I thought. And then I remembered.

Eighteen years ago, I travelled to Tasmania for the first time, with a man I didn’t know very well, but ended up marrying. We’d been dating for a couple of months, and in a flash of enthusiasm, he asked if I’d go travelling around the island with him. Spending a week alone with someone I’d so recently gotten to know felt risky, yet I needn’t have worried. The trip was wonderful, and we still look back on it as the week that sealed our union.

Since then, we’ve returned to Tasmania several times, and those trips always seem to coincide with big life events. We even honeymooned there after our registry office marriage; a single exciting night, while my brother looked after our toddler son.

It was a decade before we returned, this time with two considerably larger children in tow. The plan was to spend three nights in Hobart, a visit to MONA and Port Arthur, and a drive up Mount Wellington in the hope there’d be snow for the kids. We could find that Greek restaurant in Battery Point, my husband said, the one we ate at on our first trip. The place where we’d had so much fun, back when we were young.

Initially, I resisted the idea of going away. My father had been sick for a long time, and his illness was entering its final stages. My brother was in Sydney, looking after him, and while we travelled I phoned him every few hours, fearing the worst. But Dad didn’t die that weekend, and on the plane back to Melbourne, I felt only a selfish kind of relief that I’d made it through our holiday without losing a parent.

That was nearly four years ago. Dad’s death was sad, and I miss him terribly, but with a long, drawn-out illness, grieving becomes complex; muddled by the relief you feel when the awfulness finally ends, and the “what ifs” are all answered.

Perhaps the drawn-out nature of his illness explains why I’ve never experienced one common symptom of loss; the “I must tell my loved one about this” moment, when something exciting happens, and you have a reflexive desire to share it, only to remember that the person you want to tell is gone. My husband often experienced this in the wake of his mum’s death, most acutely after our kids were born, and he so badly wanted to share their milestones with her.

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I do wish I could tell Dad about my kids, and the big developments in my own life. To talk about the bloody pandemic, or some funny thing that happened while I was at the supermarket. But I never forget he’s dead, so I experience those moments as a regret at his absence, rather than a disorienting surprise.

During the recent school holidays, we went to Tassie again. Perhaps it was because of the intensity of our last trip, but as we travelled, I couldn’t seem to shake Dad from my thoughts. During a long wilderness hike, I told my son about it all, and how excruciating those few days in Hobart had felt for me. The number of times I’d called my brother to ask if Dad would make it to the end of the week. “It all seems so long ago now,” I added sadly. “It wasn’t that long ago, Mum!” my son insisted. But looking at him, so much older now, more a man than the boy he was then, I felt the passage of time acutely.