I have no actual words to describe my ‘village’ other than amazing.
My parents live the best part of 6 hours away. Pete’s parents are 8. Our closest family member is 5 hours away.
I had no idea how I was going to do this on my own. But little did I know just how many people would make sure I wasn’t.
Even before I had left the hospital hours after Pete had died, The Village had mobilised.
The Village are the family Pete and I found. They are the people who love us and who we love as close as family.
I knew them to be great people. To be fun and loving and caring and great company and who would be there whenever we needed them for help or they saw we needed it.
But I had no idea just how extraordinary those people were until Pete died.
I came home to a house with someone in it and to a delivery of food and wine.
The next morning another couple appeared with food.
Others appeared with coffee and began folding my clothes and cleaning my house and crying at the table with me when my Monday morning started with a 9am phone call from the Coroner’s Court asking for permission to conduct an autopsy on my husband.
And then they started getting me organised.
They talked through with me what I was thinking about. How I would handle things. Decisions I needed to make and they provided a listening ear, and guidance if I needed it.
There was a ‘Gather My Crew’ team created for food deliveries so we were not inundated with food. Each morning and afternoon, my Dad would get a message asking how many people were in the house for lunch or dinner and then those meals - sized appropriately for the number of people in the house - would magically appear at my door by someone who had nominated themselves for that meal.
I didn’t cook an evening meal for my family for 13 weeks.
I didn’t make a lunchbox for my youngest children when they went to school for two weeks – I just sent them to school and someone would provide them with snacks and lunch – and for the remainder of Term One, people provided the snacks and fruit for their lunchboxes so I just needed to make a sandwich.
I didn’t make a lunch for our eldest child because her canteen lunches were covered for an entire term and someone had travelled down from the Riverina for Pete's funeral with enough lunchbox snacks they had baked to last a whole term.
There have been acts of generosity big and small that have been so considerate, and so timely, that I cannot even fathom how people knew that we would need support like it.
There are still things ongoing – ways in which people are honouring Pete for the person he was and ways they are helping our family that continue to astound me.
I don’t know who a lot of the people were who did some of these things – as in, they stealthily dropped off food or paid for things. Some I met at the door as they handed over steaming hot meals. Some I managed to look in the eye and say thank you and try to hold back the tears of how overwhelmingly grateful I am for it all. Some I have been able to sit and have a wine with since. Some of them remain anonymous.
To all of them, I can only say thank you.
But thank you doesn’t really seem enough. Because I don’t actually know if those people will ever know just how much their support has, and will, mean to our family.
When our families are located so far away, their greatest worry when Pete died was about how we might cope without their support being close by. How would we go when they needed to leave? How could they travel down often enough to provide the support they knew we would need?
But it didn't take them long to realise The Village had us. They were supporting us in so many practical and personal ways, and they had lovingly taken the place of our distant family. And Pete and my little family were the recipients of the support of hundreds of hands, who had reached out to catch us to stop us falling.
So to the Villagers – THANK YOU.
Thank you for loving us.
You are the reason the children and I can function.
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