A few months before my mother died, the medical staff asked to schedule a family meeting. Mum was in hospital at the time—possibly an infection, possibly for pain management; I no longer remember.

I couldn’t really guess at what they might be going to tell us. We were aware, by then, that treatment was putting her body under great stress, divesting her of any quality of the meagre time she had left. It meant that she was spending more and more time as an inpatient instead of at home. And it was not working. Her tumour markers were rising. When we all met at the hospital that morning, my father, sisters and I, we were ushered from my mother’s room into a glass-walled room. It was oddly corporate, with a whiteboard on caster wheels, a baffling electronic entry system, chairs arranged around a boardroom table. We were: my family, the five of us; a consultant and resident physician from the palliative care and pain management department; a social worker; a palliative care nurse; and a nurse from the oncology ward where Mum was, at that time, a patient. Perhaps there were two social workers. Aside from the ward nurse and the pall care resident, I had never met any of them before. They were all women, and I was glad for that.

It turned out that the meeting had been arranged to tell us that the end was nigh. We had a few decisions to make, one of which was where Mum would die. It was difficult for our family to discuss this without crying, but we wept and talked. I recall feeling proud, in some narrow, distant part of myself, that we could conduct ourselves in such a rational manner even as we choked with grief.

We were always scrupulously careful of one another’s feelings. Sometimes it made things convoluted.

‘Lizzie has said she’d like to be at home,’ Dad began. He glanced at her. She nodded her consent, and he went on: ‘But she’s worried about the effect it’ll have on you girls.’

‘I don’t want to ruin the house for you,’ Mum let out. ‘All the happy memories. I don’t want this to be what you think of.’ My sister snatched a fistful of tissues from the box before passing it across the table.

We rushed to reassure her that she couldn’t possibly ruin it for us. I don’t know if any of us believed it. We never talked about it among ourselves. But we insisted that the good memories—the silly, the banal, the joyful—would vastly outweigh the grief of her final days. That we would rather her be in a familiar place, somewhere she was comfortable, where all of us could be together as much as we liked, as much as she wanted; where we could play music and have the windows open; where she could eat hunks of buttered baguette with anchovies and drink cheap sparkling wine for dinner if she liked.

The staff were gentle but not condescending. I think they saw that we were a very close family, that we cared deeply, that we wanted to do the right thing by Mum; that we were keenly attuned to our mother’s feelings, and protective of her. Someone warned us, It’ll be a lot of responsibility. Mum murmured, ‘I don’t know if you know how much.’

No, we said, in unison. Actually, not in unison. One of us would speak at a time, say, ‘Whenever it happens, I want you to be wherever you’ll feel most comfortable and peaceful.’ Then: ‘But I’m not trying to speak for anyone else.’ Then another sister would chime in and affirm her wish for Mum to die at home, or wherever she wanted. ‘But also, if you’d feel safer and more comfortable in a hospice, we can do that, too. It’s totally up to you.’

We were like actors in a training video. It was comically diplomatic.

We discussed other things in that meeting. The timeline, for instance. Her oncologist had said he expected her to be ‘here for Christmas but not for Easter’. We talked about community palliative care. We talked about whether it would be possible for us to take a short holiday to Queensland as a family—and how things might be arranged with local community services so that her morphine pump could be refilled every 48 hours, and other medications drawn up and administered. But mostly we talked about where the dying would happen. At least, that’s how I remember it.

The word abscess always reminds me of the word absence, and, more obscurely, the German word Abschied, which means ‘farewell’.

My mother died in my childhood bedroom. It was pleasant; as pleasant as such a thing can be. The room was at the front of the house, with a view onto the modest front garden, a weeping cherry tree, iceberg roses, azaleas, all things Mum had planted. We opened the sash windows. The net curtains puffed in the breeze. The gardenias were budding, and every day I went outside to search for new flowers to cut and bring inside for her. We’d raise them to her nose, lifting away the nasal cannula for just a moment so she could smell their perfume. Then we’d leave them in tiny vessels on her bedside table. Their fragrance was strong and clean.

After Mum died, I stayed in the house for a few months—partly to settle my father, but also to make sure my youngest sister, who still lived there at the time, was not sucked into the riptide of grief. I cleaned and cooked and shopped for groceries and walked the dogs, and functionally, it felt as though very little had changed. But there was a ragged, gaping hole in our lives. I missed sitting by Mum’s bed and bitching good-naturedly about someone else having failed to change the toilet roll; or seeing her face lighten when I brought her a snack. I missed her telling me to stop moving, to sit down, take a break. I wanted to lay with my head in her lap like I was a child, her stroking my hair and the planes of my face and the whorls of my ear.

I wanted her back. I will always want her back. Instead, I try to keep the house as she would have liked it. Clean; lived-in but tidy; well-tended garden; clean windowpanes; tablecloths and pillowslips ironed. Cards from friends, when they arrive, propped on the bookcase. It’s not a shrine because it’s still breathing. My father lives there. He does not iron his bedsheets but that’s all right since he’s the only one who sleeps in them.

I don’t feel as though the house is haunted—by Mum, by her death, by anyone. But I often feel as though I might be a haunted house.

When I visit that house now, once a week or so, I don’t feel sad that Mum died there. I wish she were still alive, of course; and I miss the version of the house that existed when she lived there. But the house is not ruined. In many ways it is no different. Its layout and dimensions are unchanged. The crockery and cutlery, the pictures hanging on the walls, the fridge magnets, the bedlinen are all the same. My father still buys fresh flowers to place around the house—usually oriental lilies, out of habit, because they were my mother’s favourite. The glassware, the bathroom cabinet, the bookshelves are all just as they were. I try to look after the garden she tended so lovingly, weeding the beds, pruning and deadheading the roses.

Probably my mother was not the first person to die in the house. I think, in fact, that when my parents purchased the place, they were informed that an elderly man had died there. In any case, it is such an old dwelling, at least by the standards of so-called Australia, that it is reasonable to assume it has witnessed death at some point.

I don’t feel sad that mum died in that house, but I do sometimes feel sad visiting it. Once, I discovered a bag of potatoes that Dad had bought and forgotten about. They had mouldered and rotted. When I extracted the bag, it leaked a foul, pungent brown liquid over the floor and my hands. The smell was so repulsive that I threw up in the kitchen sink. Afterwards, I stood breathing through my nose and fighting another wave of nausea. I tied the rubbish bag, took it outside, returned to the kitchen, and began scrubbing. By the time I finished, there was no trace of the putrid smell, but it remained in the back of my throat.

Driving home, I bawled for an hour—the sort of uncontrollable crying that leaves you with a blocked nose and vague headache. It was not merely that the potatoes were disgusting, nor that no one else had noticed or accepted responsibility for them, but that they never would have gone to rot if my mother was still alive. An overgrown garden bed, a cobwebbed corner, a thin film of dust on the leaves of indoor plants, scuff marks on the skirting-boards. Over and again, I have been surprised by the ferocity of the grief of She never would have let it get like this.

It’s not that my father is a dirty man, nor a lazy one. He vacuums daily, scrubs at the stovetop, waters the garden, picks up the dog shit, and performs laundry with the zeal of Dame Washalot. (If ever I spill red wine on a white silk shirt, or chilli oil on a delicate tablecloth, he is the one I turn to, garment in hands, for expert advice.) He is simply blind to certain elements of filth or disarray. I have come to accept, for example, that he will never think to clean the shower; and that no cheery handwritten reminders or weekly iPhone alarms will compel him to check the vegetable crisper for weeping, mouldy produce.

The death room itself, with its duck egg-blue walls, provokes no sorrow or dread in me. It is endowed with memory, but so is every other room in that house. I remember my mother there, dying slowly, but I also remember her sitting on the edge of my bed when I was sick, stroking the hair from my forehead. I remember arriving home from school to find that she’d rearranged the furniture in my bedroom. I remember her wordlessly depositing plates of sliced apple, cheese, rice crackers, orange segments, cups of coffee, while I hunched over my high school homework.

Before Mum spent her final weeks there, that room—‘the front room’, we call it, unimaginatively—was a spare room with a fold-out daybed. My sister took it to make space for the hospital bed, which we rented by the week.

Since my mother died we have been sluggish or busy; I’m not sure which. We returned the rented medical equipment (the bed, pressure care alternating air mattress, overbed table, oxygen concentrator and cylinders and back-up generator). We got rid of the things we could not donate or return (the nylon slide sheets, bed pans, ‘blueys’, adult nappies, half-used wound care items). But the room is not empty. We dump things in there: items to take to the op-shop or sell online. A few souvenirs of Mum’s palliation—an aromatic diffuser and essential oils, a jar of mouth swabs, a sharps disposal container—were left there, along with stray sheets, hospital gowns and pillows. Mum would loathe this. She would have bagged things up and donated or disposed of them long ago. When I think about that, I feel bad. But I also feel that cleaning it up is a job the four of us need to do together. What if, for example, I throw out an object which turns out to be charged with sentiment?

The plan is to purchase another bed. A proper one, not a fold-out. I have slept thousands of nights in that room, and will sleep plenty more. Mum’s death was as peaceful as it could possibly have been. How could that ever ruin a room?

My mother did not believe in ghosts, nor an afterlife; nor, as far as I knew, the existence of any sort of spiritual realm. But once she told me, shyly, that on several occasions she had felt the ‘presence’ of an elderly man in the hallway of our house. ‘It was always when you girls were little—when you were babies,’ she’d said. ‘It wasn’t frightening. It was as though he were checking to see that you were okay. He never spoke. I just had a strong feeling that he was really happy there were children in the house, and that he wanted to check on you.’

This was the only time she mentioned having experienced anything remotely metaphysical.

I have never seen or sensed this figure. I don’t know if she believed him to be the same old man who ostensibly died in the house before my parents bought it.

Since she died, I have never felt my mother’s presence in that house. She exists everywhere as memory: I can picture her sitting in the backyard on a hot day with her feet in the plastic kiddie pool. She is ironing in front of daytime television. She is at the kitchen bench pausing to consult a recipe on her phone. Her handwriting is on lists, filing-cabinet labels, cookbooks. As I write this, her profile is still among the options on the Netflix account.

I don’t have to work to conjure her memory. But I have never had the sense that she’s observing me from a corner, either.

Three weeks before Mum died, her lungs were filling with fluid. The oncologist suggested a procedure to aspirate some of this muck. Her lungs would fill again, he warned, but this would give her some respite.

In the days leading up to the thoracentesis, Mum kept saying that she heard a choir or opera in the distance, as if on a radio in another room. I could not hear this music. At the time, I attributed it to a morphine hallucination. She was mostly lucid, but would occasionally come out with something bizarre, and I’d be reminded that the dozens of drugs swimming in her system, plus the chronic pain, and the chronic lack of sleep, had cognitive effects.

It turned out that the music was the wheezing of her own lungs as they strained not to drown in their own shit. An X-ray revealed her left lung to be two-thirds filled with fluid.

I wrote this down in my Notes app. I also told a few close friends. I’ll never be able to put that in a story, I said, meaning the choir in her chest was a detail so horrific, so sublime, that it felt implausible. Like the story I’d once read about the 1974 De Feo family murders, which inspired the Amityville Horror franchise: when the corpses were being removed from the house, the body of the smallest child, nine-year-old John, had tumbled from the gurney onto the lawn. This terrible accident is the sort of detail that is, paradoxically, too grotesque for narrative, even in the dramatisation of a mass murder. Family annihilation requires no extra flourish.

What I didn’t tell these friends was that I felt bad that I’d dismissed the opera as an auditory hallucination. I was sorry I hadn’t listened harder.

My mother always said that her mother said that anything on the left-hand side of your body is ‘to do with the maternal side’. I don’t know if Mum believed it—she was not a superstitious or woo-woo sort of a person—but I do know she lost her left kidney in an accident when she was 12, and her left ovary and fallopian tube after an ectopic pregnancy when she was 27. I know that she always experienced period pain on that left-hand side, even after the ectopic, which would seem impossible.

I noticed a small lump in my left breast a few years back. It started out the size of a popcorn kernel and grew to the size of a broad bean. It took me a while to get it checked out. I had an ultrasound, then a biopsy, which determined that the growth was nothing sinister. It remained unchanged until March 2023, when it suddenly became larger and reddened. The earliest appointment I could schedule with my GP was for a month away. In the intervening weeks, the redness began to radiate outwards. The lump was hot to the touch. One day, after having a workday lunch with some friends, I returned home and began to feel steadily worse: nauseous, feverish, lightheaded. I was confident that it was an infection, and not afraid, but I also realised that I could not wait another ten days to see my GP.

I walked to St Vincent’s hospital. It was a Tuesday evening and the ER was in chaos. A woman was screaming at no one in particular about having been made to wait an inordinate amount of time. A man was vomiting noisily. The triage nurse explained to me that they’d been dealing with several critical accidents all afternoon, and that there would likely be several hours’ wait before I was seen. ‘I would have done exactly the same thing as you, and come in,’ she said kindly, ‘but I just want you to know that you won’t be considered high priority, so it could be a long wait.’ I decided to hang around for a bit and come back in the morning if I had to. I read a quarter of a Joyce Carol Oates book, hot and sick.

In the end I was seen that night, and not made to feel foolish at all. My breast was indeed infected. I was given IV antibiotics and a saline drip. Around two am, I was admitted to a musculoskeletal ward, the only place with a spare bed. There were three other women in the room, all much older than me. None of them was able to walk to the bathroom without assistance. The woman opposite me cried out in pain.

The following afternoon, I had an ultrasound-guided aspiration on the abscess. It was not dissimilar to the biopsy I’d had a year before, only a little painful. I watched the screen, on which I could see fatty striated breast tissue, the opaque infected mass, and the long needle. I tried to keep as still as possible. I felt grimy and jetlagged. I longed to shower, brush my teeth. The doctor who performed the procedure told me I had a very high pain threshold. I felt perversely proud; though in truth, the pain was not intolerable.

But I was also thinking about Mum undergoing the thoracentesis shortly before she died; how they aspirated a litre and a half of fluid from her lung, and how that was the least of all the discomfort she’d endured over the last thirty years of chronic illness. I started to feel irritated by the doctor’s soothing, her cheerleading. ‘Look at all this’, she breathed, shaking her head. This is nothing, I wanted to say. But I kept still. When I was returned to the ward, my best friend had appeared. She was working diligently on her laptop. She’d brought a punnet of blueberries and a carton of Japanese sweets. We made disgusting jokes about the abscess and the mochi filling. I’d been told I’d need to stay another night, but as we sat there with the gelatinous sweets spread between us, giggling quietly, a very young doctor appeared and asked would I like to go home tonight?

My friend drove me home in her beat-up VW and parked illegally opposite my apartment building. The child lock was on the door, or perhaps the door was just broken: either way, I was trapped in the suicide seat. ‘Help me!’ I laughed, and she sprang up to open the passenger door like a chauffeur. I walked into my flat holding my handbag with my book, mobile phone and charger, earphones, prescriptions, lip balm, tampons, and the plastic bag that contained the half-eaten blueberries and breast-like mochi. I peeled off my clothes and threw them in the machine, and then drew a bath. Scarcely twenty-four hours had passed since I’d left my apartment. I felt fine, physically. I had not lost anything, nor come home with a devastating diagnosis. I had never been afraid. From the start, I’d been certain that I had an infection, and that it would be treated swiftly. Now, though, it felt as though I’d cheated something. It was a ‘normal’ hospital story—one where you go in and they fix you up, and that’s all that happens. But I was accustomed to disaster; to a seemingly minor or recognisable problem mutating into something devastating.

I messaged a close friend and told her about the stupidity and lucklessness of it. An abscess, an infected breast. A freak thing in a non-breastfeeding person. My friend, who happens to be a palliative care social worker, gently pointed out the date. It was three months to the day since my mother had died.

I fell into bed so tired that I couldn’t be bothered plugging in my phone charger. The infection site throbbed. I could not sleep on my left side, but after a few days, the pain subsided, and I forgot all about it.

Among the few items on my laptop’s desktop is a .jpg file—Mum’s chest X-ray taken before the thoracentesis. From time to time I am compelled to click on this image and examine it as though I might learn something new, though the procedure was a success, and afterwards Mum could breathe much more comfortably, and she never again mentioned hearing an opera. At the top of the x-ray, a blue banner reads Images are not for diagnostic purposes. SEE WHY. The image shows her clavicles, ribcage, and spine. If you look closely, you can see her chest port and its fine tubing. The fluid on her lungs is an opaque milky whiteness. The horror lives there, too.