The Phone Call I Was Never Going to Make

Byway of background 

When I sold my house in the city and moved to a coastal regional area, I was still reeling from the sudden loss of my husband. I was emotionally drained, fragile and lost in the darkness of grief, but I knew I couldn’t stay where I was. Finding a way out seemed the only option.

I completed a massive garden makeover. It was beautiful. But nothing changed. The dark clouds continued to descend.

Then I renovated the house. Once again, it looked beautiful. Once again, nothing changed.

The memories and the trauma kept pulling me back in.

So the solution seemed obvious: move away.

One thing many people don’t recognise about losing a life partner is that when they die, part of us seems to disappear with them. What surprised me was just how much of me I had lost — my identity, my confidence and, perhaps most unexpectedly, my sense of self-worth.

I no longer quite recognised the person who was left behind. From successful career woman and wife to a shattered shell was not something I ever expected would happen to me. I never imagined how low I would sink.

Moving helped. Slowly, I began reclaiming little pieces of myself. But it wasn’t too long before I felt myself being drawn into circumstances that began eroding the fragile confidence and self-worth I was only just starting to rebuild.

So once again, the answer seemed to be: move.

And I did.

Looking back, I thought I was moving away from places and circumstances. I think what I was really doing was trying to find my way back to myself. I’ve written about that journey elsewhere — the difficult transition from we back to me. It isn’t easy.

But moving didn’t solve everything. Eventually I realised that, for my own wellbeing, severing certain ties was the only option left.

We talk about the straw that broke the camel’s back. For me, that straw came during the COVID lockdown.

Albeit brief, it remains the only time in my life I have experienced devastating loneliness. I’ve felt alone at different times in my life, but loneliness is something else entirely. There is a profound difference between being alone and feeling that there is nobody there.

And it was a phone call that finally broke something in me.

I won’t go into the details. I don’t need to. Other than to say the conversation was entirely one way. Not one word was asked about how I was feeling or how I was coping.

Then the conversation turned to our mothers.

I said I would give anything to have my mother back.

The retort came:

“Your mother is dead. It’s not the same.”

Those few words pierced my heart in a way I have never forgotten.

I hung up the phone.

And more than three years of silence followed.

I vowed I would have nothing more to do with the one person I had thought would understand better than most what I was struggling with.

And I meant it.

Which makes what happened next all the more difficult to explain, because when I make up my mind to do something, I generally stick to it.

Many times over the past nearly two years, I’ve asked myself why, on hearing the news of the death of a treasured pet, I relented and made the phone call I had vowed I would never make.

There were plenty of reasons not to.

I knew how much it had cost me emotionally before. I knew how hard I had worked to recover the pieces of myself I had lost. And the responses of two good friends and a family member when they discovered what I’d done have echoed in my head many times since:

“You are a bloody idiot. Have you forgotten the state you were in previously?”

No. I hadn’t forgotten.

So why did I do it?

Perhaps the question isn’t simply why I reopened a door I had deliberately closed.

Perhaps the question is what was it in me that, on hearing of someone else’s loss, couldn’t simply walk away?

Compassion? History? Instinct? Some bond that three years of silence hadn’t completely severed?

Or perhaps there are some phone calls we make without fully understanding why until much later.

I’m still working that one out.

I thought it would be a simple call.

I’m sorry for your loss. He was a beautiful dog.

The end.

I had absolutely no idea what I was about to discover. The story that unfolded was difficult to believe. Nor did I have any idea of the journey that one phone call would send me on — a journey that would teach me more about myself, about the choices we make, the limits of what we can do for others, and, importantly, what I still have to contribute to life.

Perhaps, in the end, that is why I made the phone call I was never going to make.

But that’s another story.

The Beginning

This is the story of three women who were thrown together by chance, drifted apart through circumstance, and, years later, found themselves drawn back together by circumstances none of them could have imagined.

Three very different women.

The Gypsy — the butterfly who flits from one place to another, searching perhaps for the anchor she lost long ago.

The Hippie — one of life’s beautiful souls. Someone who cares deeply for others and has devoted much of her life to helping those less fortunate.

And the Duchess — refined, determined and fiercely independent. Someone who learned long ago that when life changes without your permission, sometimes the only choice you have is to change with it.

Their story begins in 2019.

Following the sudden death of her husband, the Duchess had reached the difficult conclusion that she could no longer remain in the Sydney home they had shared. It held a lifetime of memories, but increasingly those memories had become a weight rather than a comfort.

So, in September 2019, she packed up her life and, accompanied by her beautiful cat Aslan, moved to the NSW coast.

It wasn’t an easy move, but it was a necessary one. Continuing to live surrounded by memories of the life she had lost was taking an enormous emotional toll. She wasn’t running away from her past. She was trying to discover whether there might still be a future.

Her first introduction to a neighbour was a welcoming one. Alan, the Gypsy’s partner, came over to introduce himself.

The neighbours on the other side, Kel and Al, weren’t quite so welcoming initially. But barriers have a habit of falling when people live beside one another, and before long the Duchess began to feel that perhaps she really had found her forever home.

Life, however, had apparently decided that simply moving house wasn’t enough adventure for one year.

Within weeks of arriving, the Duchess found herself in the middle of some of the worst bushfires NSW had experienced in years. For someone newly arrived, newly widowed and still finding her feet, it could have been terrifying. Instead, her neighbours made sure she knew she wasn’t facing it alone.

Eventually the fires went out. Life settled. And friendships began to form.

Then, in May 2020, a new resident arrived in the Parade, moving into the house opposite the Duchess.

The Gypsy had arrived.

Like the Duchess, she too had been widowed, and grief became an immediate bond between them. There are things about losing the person with whom you expected to grow old that require very little explanation between those who have experienced it.

The Gypsy soon became part of the weekly social gatherings with the Duchess, Kel and Al. She and the Duchess also began having adventures of their own, exploring the region they now called home.

Then one particularly jovial Friday evening, while drinks were underway at the Duchess’s home, a voice floated over from next door.

“Can I come over?”

It was the Hippie.

The answer was a resounding, “Yes!”

And with that simple question, another friendship began.

The Hippie and Al, Kel and Al, the Gypsy and the Duchess became a little tribe of their own.

For the Duchess, those friendships became far more important than anyone probably realised at the time.

After her husband’s sudden death, she had built a very thick shell around herself. Always naturally shy and introverted, withdrawing from the world had been dangerously easy. Solitude felt safe. Perhaps too safe.

But these people kept drawing her back into life.

Slowly, she began rebuilding her confidence and rediscovering her sense of self. Friday drinks became something to look forward to. There was laughter again. Conversation. Friendship. A feeling of belonging.

For a while, it was exactly what she needed.

But life rarely leaves things exactly as they are.

As 2020 progressed, the Duchess began to wonder whether the house she had thought would be her forever home actually was. It was a beautiful home, but something no longer felt right. She became unsettled. Tensions also began developing within the group, changing some of the easy friendships that had formed so naturally.

By the end of that year, she had decided it was time to move again.

In November 2020, she found another beautiful home about twenty minutes away, this time close to the beach. She bought it, put her existing home on the market and moved in April 2021.

For a while, the friendships continued.

But friendships forged through circumstance can sometimes be pulled apart by circumstance too.

Lives changed. Distance intervened. The closeness faded.

And the Gypsy lived up to her name. She moved away, and then moved again. And again. Always seemingly searching for somewhere that might finally feel like home.

The three women went on with their separate lives.

The Duchess settled into hers by the sea.

The Hippie continued being the Hippie.

And the Gypsy kept wandering.

It might easily have ended there, three women whose lives had crossed briefly before heading in different directions.

Except life wasn’t finished with them.

In early 2025, an extraordinary series of circumstances began drawing the Gypsy, the Hippie and the Duchess back together.

And this time, their friendship would be tested in ways none of them could possibly have imagined.

This is where their story really begins.