The day of Pete's funeral was the most bizzare day of my life.
I kind of feel like for most of it, it was an out of body experience and during the day it felt like I was watching someone else do the things and have the conversations.
It was also odd that it was almost like planning a wedding.
Was the venue ready?
Did everyone know where they were going and when?
Was the grog cold?
Has everyone eaten something beforehand?
Choosing an outfit had seemed so completely ludicrous the day before. I had tried on every dress and potential outfit I owned and paraded in front of family members to get their opinion ... too tight? too loose? dressy enough? too casual? appropriate? can I stand all day in these shoes? do I need stockings? what do you mean once I have my good underwear on - this IS my good bra?
A solid hour of clothes trying on instantly went out the window when I friend offered a perfect dress, but that didn't solve my problem of the actual day when attempting to put on make up around tears.
I stood in my bathroom and applied eye make up four times. Each time I thought I'd stopped a flood of tears and mopped up my face and re-applied make up, the tears would reappear and I had to start again.
Just before we left for the funeral I stood in the kitchen and sobbed at my parents, "I don't want to do this" and the tears came again. I clenched my teeth with all of my might and breathed hard ... I had no concealer left after the crying efforts earlier and we were already about to start running late - I couldn't fix it again.
We had talked to the kids for days about the process of the day. On the day we had taken them to the venue to make sure they were comfortable with it. I had absolutely no idea what I could do to buffer the burden of the day for them other than that. And cuddles.
They wanted to speak at their father's funeral. They weren't sure how they'd go. We had practiced their favourite 'dad jokes' they were going to tell.
In the car on the way they had asked what would happen if they couldn't tell their jokes, if they were too upset.
"What would Daddy tell you to do?"
"He'd tell us just to try to do our best"
"Then just do that"
They were extraordinary. They placed their items on the coffin and told their jokes without a crack in their voice. And they sobbed their hearts out on either side of it.
The whole event was perfect. The stories, the reading, the poem, the final toast, and absolutely the two blokes who ran the service - both of whom knew Pete well, so made it all about him. The way it should have been.
Once it was over, I stood and talked to people in the one spot for two-and-a-half-hours and still didn't get to speak to everyone who was there. I lost count of those I only half spoke to. I held onto one glass of bubbles for over an hour while it got flat and warm and barely took a sip.
I was so overwhelmed by the people who came - more than 500 people who took the time to farewell Pete. There were people from his childhood who could tell tales of bows and arrows and slug guns being used inappropriately. People from his teen years and early 20s who had run amok with him around Hay and the Riverina B&S circuit and infamous 'Four Corners parties where it was just beer and rum and jackaroos and jillaroos on a stock route in the middle of nowhere. There were work colleagues and associates who had all been part of his most recent work life where he thrived on the challenge of learning new things and smashing sales targets and there were clients who had benefited from his boundless knowledge of livestock. There were people we knew through family, some we had met through kids. There were kids there who were so sad that our children had lost their dad. There were people we knew through sport and school. All of them were friends. All of them were there because Pete had been part of their lives in some way. And I will never be able to name or thank each and every one of them, but their presence that day meant to world to us.
I did glance around at one stage and panic that I had under-catered and if we had enough beer and wine.
They were pretty much the only non-negotiables when I started planning the whole thing and generated some obscure looks from the funeral director when I declared: There has to be rum and good wine and good food, definitely pork belly, right from the outset and before we had chosen a date or coffin.
Once the crowd had cleared we ventured to a pub for the unplanned bit of celebrating Pete's life - the rum flowed freely - and when there was a line up of 30 "fulls in fives" (full shots of rum in 5ounce glasses, with ice and a dash of coke) on the bar at 9pm, I knew that we were going to have a toast he would have loved to be part of.
When I looked around the crowd who stood at the bar, it was a scene cut directly from Conargo Pub circa 1999 - the faces of friends who we had know for so long, both individually and as a couple.
And when I left and finally went to bed that night, I felt the most obscure combination of sadness, and thankfulness, and relief, and happiness, and loneliness and comfort that so many people had taken the time to say goodbye to Pete, to acknowledge the impact he had on them, the respect with which they held him in, the support they had given our family, and their declarations of their affection for us all.
But mostly I thought that he would have bloody loved that party. That he would have been in his element. That he would have been miffed to miss such a catch up.
And that I so dearly missed looking across that crowd and seeing him and that laugh and those sparkling eyes in the thick of it.
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