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This isn’t the next post I’d planned in the transition series. It arrived this morning before my first cuppa, and since I’m learning to go with the flow, I’m sharing it with you fresh. The others in the series are coming soon.

This post is about what happens beyond liminal space, when you’ve stepped onto the new shore and you’re back in the driver’s seat of life. Grief doesn’t stay behind. It comes along as a passenger, mostly quiet, until a conversation, an anniversary or a Grand Final brings the little losses rushing back. And it’s about what I’m finding alongside the pain this time: gratitude, and the lessons Jeff left us.

Yesterday I paced the chocolate aisle at the supermarket, unable to decide which one to choose, and then the tears came. Inconsolable tears. No sunglasses, no tissues. (Chocolate is very much an emotional crutch for me, so it makes sense I was standing there and not in fruit and veg.)

It caught me by surprise. I’ve been feeling stable and strong for about four months now, a far cry from the extensive period before, when I was traversing the depths of grief, lost in the liminal space. It has been such a relief to feel aliveness again, to pop up from those depths into the seeds of a new beginning.

It seems there is a distinct point when you move out of the liminal space and arrive on the new shore. That doesn’t mean everything is settled and the grief goes away. The jigsaw puzzle my life shattered into when Jeff died still has a lot of forming to do. For me, the switch came when I’d had enough time (and therapy) to integrate the loss and could begin to contemplate the possibility of living fully again. I had grown around the grief to the point where it was no longer the lens through which I experienced all of life.

Lois Tonkin’s work on growing around grief describes this well. The grief doesn’t go away. It comes with you. But as your capacity grows around it, you’re no longer held hostage by it 24/7. There’s more mental clarity, and a desire to move forward. There’s an interest in bringing the gifts from the life that’s been and in birthing a new chapter. That starts to buoy you along. For me, amongst other things it was a knowing that it was time to get back to work, it’s as though life itself pops into the driver’s seat, and grief takes its place as a passenger.

But even with grief as the passenger, it can still cry out like an upset child in the back seat and send you swerving.

Over the past few days, I’ve felt emotion surfacing and had been curious about it. The second anniversary of Jeff’s passing is fast approaching, and I’ve been present to how this might be for me this time around. Then that morning, I’d had a conversation with a friend.

Several years ago, my friend separated after a loving thirty-year marriage. The night before, for the first time, he’d gathered with his ex-wife and their three adult children for dinner, the five of them finding their new way forward as a family. The evening went well, and I was genuinely delighted for them all. It takes relationships that are sufficiently intact, and egos and self-interest stepping aside, to make that happen. Sadly, from what I’ve observed from the sidelines, it often not the case.

As he shared his experience, something landed starkly in front of me: our band will never be back together again. Being a family of musicians, we playfully called ourselves the von Vagues (as in the von Trapps), and nothing made us happier than when the band was together. Of course, I’ve known this for nearly two years, but yesterday it arrived like fresh news. While everyone is still living, there’s a choice to come back together. When one of you dies, that choice dies too. Jeff has gone and so has our family unit in that form.

I don’t regret the conversation. In fact, I’m grateful for it. It helped me attend to a micro-loss my mind hadn’t yet caught up with, and it sparked this reflection. What matters is that it’s possible for his family, and that, through choosing love, they’ve created a new ritual to come together, simply because they can. We can all learn from that.

And then there was the day itself. Yesterday was AFL Grand Final Day 2026, and Grand Final Day will always mark one of those harder days in our lives.

Jeff was an avid football follower. His big brother cultivated that love, taking him to games and talking all things Fitzroy (now the Brisbane Lions) from when he was a small boy.

In 2023, not long after we nearly lost Jeff to a severe reaction to a clinical trial drug, he miraculously made it to the Grand Final in person. It wasn’t a win for his team, but he loved every minute.

In 2024, on the last Saturday in September, my dear sister and her husband helped us bring Jeff home from palliative care for the day. It would be his last time at home. He had been slowly drifting away for weeks by then, his mind and soul beginning their journey of departing his body. I now understand this is often the way. It’s another of life’s transitions, as perfectly designed as birth: a process, not a single moment.

The Lions won that day. What stays with us most is watching Jeff muster everything he could to celebrate, when really a football match matters so little when you’re about to leave this earth. All the things that were so much a part of who you were simply fall away. His vacant expression and half-hearted wave of the flag as the siren sounded broke our already broken hearts a little more. And still, I’m so grateful we had that final day together at home as a family.

In 2025, eleven months after Jeff died and in the deepest part of my grief, I prayed the Lions would bomb out before the Grand Final. I didn’t know how we would get through reliving our 2024 experience. They made it, and they won. Jeff would have been delighted. Somehow, we navigated that difficult day, and two of our daughters even made it to the Grand Final in person, because that’s what you do: you get up and keep going.

I thought that another year down the track, yesterday’s Grand Final would be easier. But it’s amazing how our bodies know and our minds remember. Those same heart-wrenching scenes from 2024 replayed in my mind’s eye, and today I feel emotionally hungover without having touched a drop.

But something has shifted. Alongside the pain in the memories, I can now feel immense gratitude too. I’m grateful Jeff came home that last day to sit in his favourite chair with a bowl of Haigh’s chocolate caramels, hot chips and sausage rolls, as was always the way on Grand Final Day. I’m grateful for the people who held us so we could make it happen. And I’m grateful for what Jeff taught us through his courage over those 15 months.

Gratitude was one of Jeff’s greatest qualities, and he never stopped expressing it. On our fridge there’s still a torn scrap of paper in his handwriting, from a family practice we started during the COVID pandemic to lift each other’s spirits. It simply asks: What are you most grateful for in this moment? Even as the effects of the brain tumour took so much of his understanding, and amid his intense suffering as he faced his own mortality, he would tell us each day that he felt loved and held, and how thankful he was. He extended that gratitude to everyone in his path, and to this day I borrow his words that he would always use to thank the cleaner, the doctor or anyone else helping him: “Thank you for your work.”

So, the tears in the chocolate aisle weren’t a step backwards. This is what grief does, even after you’ve stepped onto the new shore. As you engage with life, you’re reminded of the thousands of little losses, the things no longer possible because they ended when your person died. I recognise this will happen forever more. We grow around grief, and it comes with us. That’s the nature of loss, because that’s the nature of love.

We only feel the depth of the loss because of the depth of the love. Fortunately, love doesn’t leave when the person dies. We feel Jeff’s love with us every day. He taught us what truly matters when everything is stripped away. That wisdom guides our choices still, and it is shaping our daughters into three young women he would be so enormously proud of.

Great work from above, Jeff, helping your team to three in a row. Go Lions. They’ll be counting on you for the fourth victory next year.

We miss you more than words can ever hold. Thank you for being our teacher, for being the bass in our band, and for your eternal love. We will love you forever x

And in Jeff’s words, from our fridge to yours: what are you most grateful for in this moment?

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Photo: 28th September 2024. The von Vagues, Grand Final Day 2024. Jeff’s last day at home.