JUSTIN

Mornings are always the same for me. Little thought goes into them. Wake up, shower, dress on autopilot. I leave the house, grab a coffee and jump on a tram. My brain rarely kicks into gear until I am at my desk.

But the other day was different. Coffee in hand, I picked up a free newspaper showcasing Darebin writers. Local scribblers, poets and novelists, that sort of thing. Inside was a poem called Justin.

Justin

Our street looks much the same
patterns of sunlight and shade
Federation houses with
laced verandahs, picket fences
women with green shopping bags
slung across pram handles
boys on skateboards
racing down the centre of the road
a new graffiti message
in large white letters on a brown brick wall
Justin RIP
Bashed at a party brawl
he failed to wake up
He’s rarely mentioned now
but we’re left
with a terrible emptiness
in the house where he lived

Marietta Elliott-Kleerkoper

Justin was 16. I know this because when I couldn’t shake the sense of loss the poem had left me with, I looked him up. A quick search uncovered a newspaper article on his untimely death. There was a photograph of his friends carrying his coffin and behind them his mother’s vacant face stared out. I had a clear snapshot of the moment her life changed forever.

I am part of this. I intrude into people’s lives when least wanted. I stand watching; then try to encapsulate what has happened into a piece of news. I’ve looked up names in a phone book and cold called them. I draw out how they are feeling. I find the saddest comment and make it a sound-bite. Their loss becomes a 40 second radio story. Then I disappear. For me the next day will be different; different strangers; a different story. All the while Justin’s mother walks along her street which looks the same, but isn’t.

Last year at the Melbourne Writers Festival a well known American author described grief as being like a hole inside through which large volumes of air gush out. It makes you catch breath. Ask anyone who has ever lost someone and they will tell you that gapping cavern never disappears. It becomes part of you and you learn to live with it.

I think of Justin’s mother walking down the street lined with federation style houses and picket fences. I wonder if the graffiti remains on the wall. Later she sits at the kitchen table cradling a hot drink. Is she waiting to hear his keys jingle as he arrives home? Or the jarring sound of his bedroom door slammed shut with teenage-angst? Unlike mine, her mornings will never be the same again.

Maybe it’s this snap shot that needs to be told. The picture of a house very much the same but utterly changed. In it, one woman waiting for someone to say her son's name.