By Susan Merrell.

I was walking beside the harbour when I heard the news. It was a glorious day.  The sun was dancing on the water like a thousand diamonds. News like this ought to be banned on such a day – or maybe even any day.  The SMS text message delivered its knock out punch.  I wasn’t prepared.

The text read:

“This is Tanya.  Michael’s daughter.  After a long illness Michael passed away around midnight last night.”

It became dark as I uttered the denial.

“No!”

My son who was walking beside me took the phone from my hands. He read the message.

“Mum, who is he?”

Tanya left me her number to ring should I “want to talk”.  Who did she think I was?  How did she get my number?

Michael and I met when we were very young and had too many responsibilities.  It was a time when the weight of the world felt like it was on our young shoulders.  We both had marriages, mortgages and were bringing up young children.

The meeting took place at the primary school that both our children attended – at the annual wine-and-cheese, meet-the-parents’ night.  Or as Michael called it, the Chine and Wees night.  He was president of the school council, I was a new parent.  The attraction was instant and from our first kiss we had trouble keeping our hands off each other.

The attraction and the subsequent affair confused us.  We were both fully committed to our respective marriages.  In retrospect, I think it had a lot to do with the need to be totally irresponsible.  And we were.

We met at lunch times.  Sometimes I’d meet him off the train for a few minutes of a passionate embrace before we both went to our separate homes.  We’d leave suggestive messages for each other in the classified pages of the daily newspaper.  We made love everywhere.  It was in a Melbourne downpour that we made love in a phone box outside Flinders Street Station wrapped in my voluminous raincoat.

Michael always did things to make me happy. “I love it when you smile,” he’d say. Once finding ourselves drinking at the same pub as Ron Barassi, I said to Michael:

“I’ve always wanted to meet Barassi.”

“No problems,” he said, as he took me over and introduced me.

I didn’t know Michael knew Barassi.  Turned out he didn’t.

Michael was a voracious reader, devouring often more than five books a week.  He was not tertiary educated but as a result of his reading had a vocabulary far larger than he had ever heard spoken.  Consequently, his mispronunciations were legendary.  My favourite was when he’d tell me he was “enamoured” with me but would place the stress on the wrong syllable making the word sound like enna mored. But then he’d usually argue the toss that he was right and I was wrong.

Another peculiarity of Michael’s was that he was profoundly colour blind.  It wasn’t that he mistook one colour for another, he simply had no idea what most colours were – so he’d guess.

“I love you in green,” he once told me.

“I’m wearing pink,” I replied.

“Yes, but it’s greenish pink, isn’t it?” he countered.

He’d tell me I was beautiful.  I needed to hear that.  I adored him.

I don’t know how it ended, I don’t know that it ever did.  But I moved away, started a new life, a new marriage. We kept in contact for a while.  If I was down, I’d call him. He’d make me laugh.  He was so much larger than life.

Then more than a decade went past where we didn’t speak.  But Michael was never completely out of my thoughts.  It was I that sought him out again.  After all the time that had past, I still couldn’t leave him alone.

His first words, after a decade were: “Darling, are you still beautiful?” How can you help loving such a man?

But the years had not been kind to Michael.  He’d grabbed life by the throat and given it a good shake.  He’d played hard and life was biting back.  At a relatively young age he’d had a massive heart attack.  They had not expected him to live.  He’d never totally regained his health.

I remember thinking when I put down the phone how devastated I’d have been if I’d looked for him just to find him gone.  We kept in closer contact from then on.  Michael would often comment on my various articles and blogs.

Michael’s contribution to my life has been very private but very profound.  There’ll never be anyone like him.  From the time we met I was totally enna mored.

So tomorrow, I will sit at the back of the church at his funeral service.  I will be the cliché of the mourner that nobody knows.  I’m doing it for him.  He would have liked it.