The author and her husband Jeremy, on a sunny day road trip to see California poppies before everything changed.

In August of last year, after an eight-month battle with cancer, my husband, Jeremy, passed away. We had flown back to his native Australia for his final weeks. He loved his home and his people too much to be anywhere else in the end.

There’s no handbook for how to be a person after losing your person. Yet somehow, I stayed afloat. I planned his celebration of life, spent time with his family, wrote his eulogy, canceled his credit cards. You know, just a regular to-do list. But inside, I was drowning.

I call this phase “grief drunk.” You’re handed the keys to a car and told to drive, even though you’re completely out of your mind. I wasn’t in my body. (I’m still not in my body.) I was hovering above it, watching myself do impossible things.

Jeremy chose to be cremated. A few weeks before he died, we had one of many brutal but beautiful hospital conversations. He gave me a list of places he wanted his ashes spread. One of them was Sydney Harbour. So I planned to do that before flying home.

Jess, one of his best friends, drove me to the crematorium. I couldn’t have done it alone.

When we got there, we walked into an empty office. On the counter was a bag with a sticky note that said my name. Inside was a heavy cardboard cylinder with a certificate rubber-banded around it. Forty-four years of a beautiful life, reduced to a paper bag on a sunny afternoon. It felt like picking up takeout. No one even checked my ID.

Back at Jess’s house, I realised I needed to pour some of him, some of his ashes, into something smaller to take to the Harbour. I asked for a jar or glass bottle. Jess pulled out Tupperware. I’m sure I gave her a horrified look. Then a jam jar. No.Absolutely not. Nothing felt right.

Finally, she found a small glass bottle with a long neck. It felt… less wrong. We fashioned a newspaper funnel. I lifted the cardboard tube and began to pour my husband into a bottle, between her kids’ art on the fridge and the barking dog. I cracked a dark joke ― something like, “It looks like cat litter.” We both laughed at the absurdity of it all. Then I went to the bathroom to cry for the millionth time that week.

Only five months earlier, he had been blowing out birthday candles on this same counter.

"No one prepares you for what this part looks like ―........

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