The Pin on My Jacket at a Funeral I Wasn't Ready For

The morning the church bells were still a rumour in the sky, I stood in front of a borrowed wardrobe in Adelaide and tried to remember how to dress for grief. I had flown in the night before, the plane tilting through a bruised sunset over the Mount Lofty Ranges, and I was rummaging through my sister's suitcase for something black enough, soft enough, kind enough to say the right thing without me having to speak.

The pin itself came from a small op shop in West End, Brisbane, where I had ducked in to escape an afternoon downpour a few springs earlier. It sat in a cardboard tray between a cracked cameo and a pair of enamel wattle pins, a small tarnished silver thing shaped like a crescent moon with a single seed pearl at its centre. I bought it for four dollars because the woman at the counter wrapped it in tissue and called me love, and because I trust the objects that find me in rooms I wander into by accident.

I was not ready for the funeral. I had spent the week telling myself I was. I had answered the condolence emails, packed the right shoes, written the eulogy in my head twice. But readiness is a coat you try on in the mirror and then watch fall open at the shoulders the moment you step into the car.

A Crescent Moon from West End

The pin lived on my dresser for almost a year after I bought it. Sometimes I wore it on the lapel of a linen blazer when I taught Sunday afternoon writing workshops in a converted woolstore. Sometimes I tucked it into the brim of a felt hat when the weather turned. It became one of those small objects you forget you are carrying until a stranger leans in and asks about it, and then you remember it has been telling your story for you.

When the funeral was called, I knew it had to come with me. I did not know why yet. I only knew I could not picture the day without that small silver curve pinned somewhere on my body, catching the light the way a question catches in the throat.

Choosing the Jacket in the Blue Hour

I chose a charcoal wool coat I had bought years ago at a sample sale in a Melbourne laneway off Manchester Alley, the kind of cut that sits cleanly on the shoulders and lets the rain bead up and roll off the sleeves. It had pockets deep enough for a tissue and a folded order of service, and it smelled faintly of the cedar block my grandmother kept in her wardrobe.

I pinned the moon to the left lapel, just below the collar, and stepped back from the mirror. The pearl caught the bathroom light like a small comma in a sentence I had not finished writing. I pinned it because it was the only honest thing I had to wear.

Arriving at the Chapel in Norwood

The chapel sat on a quiet street in Norwood, half-hidden behind a hedge of native grevillea spilling pink toothbrush flowers over the footpath in winter. I arrived early because my mother taught me early is a form of respect, and because I needed ten minutes alone in the car with the radio down and the window cracked to the smell of eucalyptus.

Inside, the room was dressed in white lilies and pale waxflower, and a woman near the door handed me a program printed in soft mint green, the colour the funeral home had chosen because she had loved mint. Wattle stems were tucked into the ends of the pews, their yellow puffballs trembling like small furious suns. Someone had hung a framed photograph on an easel near the front.

What the Pin Held in the Room

During the eulogy I did not cry. I watched instead. I watched the light shift across the rose-tinted carpet, an old man in a brown corduroy jacket grip the lectern like a railing on a ship. I watched my cousin press her thumb into the back of her hand. I watched the minister read from a passage I half-recognised.

When the hymn began, I felt someone glance down at my collar. It was a woman I did not know, perhaps an aunt by marriage or a friend from a long-ago Christmas lunch in Bowral. She caught my eye and gave me a small nod. She mouthed the words of the hymn, and I mouthed them with her, and for a moment the pin was the only bridge between us.

Later, a man in a flat cap told me his wife had worn a moon brooch to her own mother's funeral in a country town near Wagga Wagga. Funny the things that follow you around, he said, and I did not know whether he meant the brooch or the grief.

The Shout and the Drive Home

After the service, a small group of us walked to a cafe on The Parade where someone ordered flat whites and called it a shout, the old Australian custom of buying a drink in memory of the person you have lost. I held the warm cup in both palms and watched the steam curl over the milk. We did not say much. We did not need to.

I drove back to my sister's place along the coast, the late afternoon light turning the water along Glenelg into a sheet of hammered tin. The road curved, and the moon on my lapel slid into shadow and then back into light, and I kept glancing at it in the rear-view mirror as if it were a small companion beside me.

What I Carried Forward

I thought about the woman in West End who had wrapped the pin in tissue and called me love. I thought about the man at the funeral whose wife had worn the same shape to a different funeral in a different decade. I thought about how grief is partly a collection of small objects we carry from one loss into the next.

There is a particular kind of bravery that has nothing to do with public speaking or climbing mountains. It is the bravery of putting on a coat and a small piece of jewellery and driving across a city to sit among people you may not see again. It is the bravery of being seen in the shape of your own honest, insufficient love. I wrote about that quiet kind of presence afterwards in what I learned, and it is the truest thing I have published in a long while.

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