Julia Baird: Exactly how do you go about grieving the death of an ex?
When the man she almost married died in a plane crash, she was grief-stricken – and unsure of the place for her sorrow.
By Julia Baird
Julia Baird: her ex-boyfriend Morgan Mellish, who shared her love of the ocean, taught her to surf.Credit: Stephen Blake/Courtesy of ABC Compass
T WO WEEKS after I had started my job at a news magazine in New York, with a breast pump for a six-month-old baby girl slung over my arm, I woke to a flurry of voicemails and messages from Australia. My ex-boyfriend Morgan was missing. He had been on a plane in Indonesia that had overshot the runway, skidded across a road and onto a field, and burst into flames, and he was not accounted for.
My phone trembled and vibrated with messages for hours as I sat and stared into space. I nursed my baby in silence, got dressed and made my way through the snow to the subway. In between meetings, I sat in my office overlooking a snow-white, fairy-tale Central Park, feeling sick, and tried to concentrate on editing my pages. On the television at the end of my desk, footage of a burning, skidding plane played on a loop as the world tried to fathom what had happened and who was lost.
He called himself ‘Captain Sensible’, although sometimes he would burst out and be the wildest and happiest person in the room.
Morgan could not be found. Morgan, from whom I had separated less than two years before. Morgan, who had asked me to marry him in the mountains of Morocco. Handsome Morgan, the tall surfer with salt in his veins and a ready grin, who had worked on the other side of the newsroom from me, in the business section. Morgan, who had stayed with me at the office Christmas party one year until we were, finally, alone; I folded into him when he told me he had a crush on me.
He was direct, strong and certain: he was content to let me write and stay out late dancing when he wanted to get up early to train for triathlons, and he took time off work to help me finish my PhD, sourcing photographs. He called himself “Captain Sensible”, although sometimes he would burst out and be the wildest and happiest person in the room.
Morgan was less interested in what people thought of him than anyone I have ever met. “You can’t have everyone like you,” he’d say when I fretted about something uselessly. “That’s just not possible.” He often rubbed people up the wrong way, appearing remote, and shrugged it off as their problem. We were not, ultimately, meant to be together, but I adored him and curled up in his calm and contentment as we lived together happily for years. He was detached, sometimes, from people: he had a wide circle of acquaintances, but he believed he only had a handful of true friends.
The creature he doted on most was Otis, our Burmese cat. He fussed over that chocolate lunatic, allowing him to sleep on his stomach under the covers and racing home after work to play with him. He wrote me simple cards of love: All I need to be happy is to be near you and I love you more every day, and will forever.
But Morgan, the man who had once been my Morgan, could not be found. The Beatles’ lyrics about hearing the news today kept recycling through my brain, over and over, as I waited. Oh, boy. We had broken up such a short time ago, after a year of counselling and wrenching frustration, knowing we loved each other but couldn’t fix things in the way we needed to in order to last. As I cried before finally leaving, he said to me, “Well, I think that is very sad,” and I cried some more.
Julia Baird with her then boyfriend, fellow journalist Morgan Mellish, in the early 2000s.Credit: COURTESY OF JULIA BAIRD
Since then, he had travelled the world, won a Walkley award for his journalism and dated a cluster of pretty women; I had quickly fallen in love, got married and gone to the US and had a baby, at almost unseemly, breakneck speed. Which meant that, when Morgan could not be found, the memories of him, of him and me curled up together in our home, were still warm, that the imprint of his hand in mine was still fresh. Five years we had spent together, four of them living in a sweet, old, run-down apartment overlooking Bronte Beach in Sydney’s east. Now, in New York, I stayed up through the night as my then-husband slept, checking my email and news reports for scraps of information about the reporters who had been following the then-Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer on his tour of Indonesia and had been on that plane, Garuda Flight 200.
But he was gone. Burnt alive in the fire. One of 21 people to die in that horrible crash near Yogyakarta Airport in early 2007, just after dawn. A man in his prime, fit and upright, just days before his 37th birthday. His poor assistant had had to identify his remains after panicked hours spent searching for his body near the wreckage and in hospital. Oh, boy.
Twenty-one people died in the Garuda Airlines Flight 200 plane crash near Yogyakarta airport in 2007.Credit: Getty Images
I had to stay late at work that Thursday night to edit my first cover story. I locked myself in my office and wept, thinking of Morgan’s daring, his decency, his fun, his kindness, his courage, his laughter, of how much he had still to do and be, of the stupid bloody waste of it all. Of the times we scuba-dived on the Great Barrier Reef, danced in tiny bars in Spain, trekked the mountains of Morocco, drank wine in Paris. I called his mother, his sister, his mates. I emailed my friends, puzzling over the senselessness of the accident. “He was obsessed with safety,” I wrote to one. “He drove a Subaru.”
So where is the place in grief for a former girlfriend, one who lived with a man who has just died, who had almost married him? In the days to come, I would see him being recast as a rogue and a ladies’ man, not the self-reliant introvert who was true and kind. All kinds of people would claim him, people he barely knew, and the women he had spent time with jostled for a place in online tributes. I quickly realised how competing, incomplete narratives of grief can add further layers of pain for the grieving.
I became fascinated by his Indonesian girlfriend, Nila Tanzil, largely because so many in Australia seemed to dismiss or overlook her in their clamouring recollections, while she insisted she be known. She wrote sweet, sad blog entries talking about how he’d wanted her to dance for him – now a newspaper correspondent and a TV host, she had once been a traditional Javanese dancer – and how she only did once because she was too shy.
When Nila went to her office on Wednesday, March 7, 2007, her colleagues had all crowded around a television, watching footage of the crash. She’d cried: “Oh, my god, Morgan’s on the plane!” His maid said his ticket was for another flight, so that day was one of confusion until one of Morgan’s friends called and said his ID card had been found.
Nila flew to Sydney for the funeral, which was quite an event, attended by politicians and editors at a big cathedral. In quiet moments, I read reports of this dainty woman standing to speak at Morgan’s wake. Boldly, she took the microphone at the morning tea after the service and told the gathered crowd: “He was my best friend, my partner, my personal editor. It was my privilege to be with him on his last days.” I cheered her on from New York. Morgan loved relationships and respected women, and so many of the public recollections had made him seem like a player. At the same morning tea, Morgan’s editor at The Australian Financial Review, Glenn Burge, said: “He had a great sense of humour, a great ability to stir the people around him – particularly the women.”
As Australian women he had dated laid claim to Morgan in online forums with varying timelines and acknowledgments, Nila insisted on reminding them he’d had a girlfriend in the months leading up to his death, one he saw every day and stayed with every night. This seemed important, somehow. In a speech to his colleagues, Laura Tingle, his bureau chief in Canberra, spoke about how he’d made his relationship with me his first priority, leaving the parliamentary gallery every Thursday afternoon like clockwork to drive back to our home in Bronte, and not returning until Monday.
As I sat there in New York, tuning magazine copy, reworking headlines and captions, and conferring with the lead writer, I received an email from Burge, saying the police were trying to find out who his dentist was, and could I help? His teeth. They needed to identify his remains by his teeth. I cracked.
People often talk about a hierarchy of grief, whereby those who loved and knew a person best grieve the loudest and clearest, but it often does not happen this way. As with biographies, side players and supporting actors frequently race to share fragments of their recollections, to insert their stories in the broader narrative of a life beautifully, imperfectly lived. It’s especially striking when it happens to someone you love.
Why do we assume an ended relationship must be defined by its end, not its beginning, or its heights?
At any rate, an ex-girlfriend is just that: an ex, gone, the stuff of rumour, conjecture and history. I had nothing to say; I was mute with grief and struggling to recognise the character newspaper reports were describing. No one mentioned how much Morgan loved spending time in silence, how much he loved the wild: the seas, mountains, rivers. How, the further he drew away from cities, the happier he became. How much he wanted to be “honourable” in life, how important the word “honour” was to him. How interested he was in time – his oft-expounded theory of ageing was that as we grow older, time speeds up – and how he always tried to do what poet and journalist Kenneth Slessor said: lean against the “golden undertow” of time.
Baird and Mellish in the early 2000s. “We entrust ourselves with each other, in relationships, and it’s a very particular kind of duty: to soften blows, to carry and delight each other, to ease pain and plunder joy.”Credit: COURTESY OF JULIA BAIRD
How preternaturally calm he was, the calmest person I have ever met. How focused and disciplined he was, at least when it came to his training for triathlons and adventure races, but how every now and then what a friend called a “party tiger hiding in the long grasses of sobriety” would emerge, and cut loose. How much space he required on a dance floor: he once almost punched a waiter at a Soho bar with a flailing limb. How he danced at home, all the time, in his swimmers, to make me laugh. And how he encapsulated his dreams for the future in a single word: “relaxing”.
I kept thinking of the poem the American Jack Gilbert, a self-described “serious romantic”, wrote about Icarus, Failing and Flying. In it, he asks why we are so glum about relationships that don’t last, why we don’t recognise that some relationships soar before fading, and tells us that that is what we need to remember, and hold. Otherwise, why would we ever dare to love? And why do we assume an ended relationship must be defined by its end, not its beginning, or its heights?
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
I wanted to fly back for the funeral but, given the distance and circumstances, I decided to stay in the shadows. I was a mother, living in another country. I was worried that, like Nila, I would want to grab the microphone and say, “No, that’s not right, he was more than that,” though I felt petty and shitty and small to even be raising eyebrows at other people’s stories, wondering if they were distorting their own role in his life. See? It sounds awful. I knew also that Morgan was many things to many people.
He died 16 years ago, but I cried again writing this. Imagine the life he could have lived.
Fifteen years after that Garuda plane overshot the runway, I walked into the Boatshed Cafe in South Perth one Tuesday morning to meet Nila for a coffee. While writing this, I had looked her up, discovered she had gone on to do some astonishing things, and emailed her out of the blue while sitting on my bed watching the sun set over Exmouth. I’m not even entirely sure why. I’d asked her how she was, if she was okay now, and how she had coped with the grief. She wrote back almost immediately, with a warm gust of words, spoke of crying three times a day for two months after Morgan died, and asked if I would ever be in Perth and could we meet? Coincidentally, I was due to arrive there a couple of days later.
Nila told me she’d had to leave her job at a public relations firm after Morgan died because so many media contacts were friends of his and were daily reminders of her loss. Three months after he died, she took a job trading bonds at a securities company, before being poached to work in Singapore. After two years there, she said, “I felt my heart was healed.” Not 100 per cent, but better. “Now, if I think of him,” she said, “I smile.”
Morgan Mellish receiving his Walkley award for business journalism in 2006.Credit: Paul Rovere
Today a mother and a force, Nila left her job in finance to establish a not-for-profit group that has set up a long chain of libraries for children in regional Indonesia. She has been an Eisenhower Fellow and an Atlantic Fellow, and is now part-way through a PhD in education at Curtin University.
Nila was sweet, candid and funny, often breaking into laughter. She was glad to talk, she said, because she had buried a lot of the sadness, as she had not known how to process it at the time, and had not yet discovered meditation. She recalled that after she had flown to Sydney for the funeral, she had sat in her hotel room, enraged: how could this happen? Why? The week before Morgan died, he’d glowed with rude health and joy, she said, remembering how she looked at him one morning as he was dressing and thought it was like he was lit up: “Wow, my boyfriend is really handsome.”
He was. And fate was, is, cruel. People often describe early, sudden deaths as senseless, as though the opposite, life, makes sense. When people who fall ill ask, “Why me?”, it always perplexes me: why someone else and not you? Why should the foul vagaries of sickness, accident and misfortune only fall on others? But it is particularly difficult to stomach an early death: of an infant, a child or a strapping, 36-year-old Australian man making a decent fist of creating a life he loved. The sheer randomness of it was exacerbated by the fact that he wasn’t meant to be on that flight, that a shift in the foreign minister’s schedule had meant he’d changed airlines at the last minute, to Garuda, which he thought would be safer than the other local carrier, Adam Air.
The Jewish-Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi wrote of the shock of having a primal, if irrational, belief in the kindness of destiny before he was captured and taken to Auschwitz in 1944:
This time last year I was a free man: an outlaw but free, I had a name and a family, I had an eager and restless mind, an agile and healthy body. I used to think of many, far-away things; of my work, of the end of the war, of good and evil, of the nature of things and of the laws which govern human actions; and also of the mountains, of singing and loving, of music, of poetry. I had an enormous, deep-rooted, foolish faith in the benevolence of fate; to kill and to die seemed extraneous literary things to me.
Cynthia Banham referenced these words of Levi in her book A Certain Light. Cynthia, then a foreign affairs and defence correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, was sitting across the aisle from Morgan as the plane slammed into the fields, but she somehow managed to drop out of the bottom of the plane and haul herself to safety through the muddy rice fields. She lost both of her legs, broke her back and suffered burns to 60 per cent of her body. She told Good Weekend that, like Levi, she had lost her naivety. “Actually, there is tragedy everywhere you look,” she said. “You can find it very easily in certain countries overseas, but even when you look in your own very privileged country, it is there in every family. Whether it’s cancer or mental illness or misfortune of some kind. Losing a child. Whatever. It’s everywhere. And actually that’s the way life is.”
The arrival of Morgan Mellish’s coffin in Canberra.Credit: SAHLAN HAYES
Despite spending years in recovery, Banham went on to acquire a master’s in international affairs, then a PhD. She became a respected scholar of political science, publishing two books, and is an ambassador for the Sydney Swans. She married and had a child. She has lived and been happy. But the memories of the accident and the days after are still too painful to speak about.
So, what can the living learn from something that makes no sense? Morgan imprinted people with his joy, in life and in death. Nila told me: “It’s funny to think that because of Morgan, now I live in a more impulsive way. I mean, if I want to do something, I just do it. [His death] made me think that we never know until when we’re going to live here on this planet. I remember that he was always full of life and fun, doing things that he enjoyed doing. So, that was one of the most valuable takeaways for me. That was also one of the reasons why I set up my non-profit organisation in a split-second after having three days of sleepless nights, thinking of kids without access to books. I thought, ‘If not now, then when?’ ”
She is right. What I also learnt is that, no matter where you find yourself, whoever you are with, even if that relationship may not always endure, we have a serious duty to honour, treasure and fiercely care for that person. We entrust ourselves with each other, in relationships, and it’s a very particular kind of duty: to soften blows, to carry and delight each other, to ease pain and plunder joy.
Oh, boy.
I took the afternoon of Morgan’s funeral off work, walked up to the Cloisters in Washington Heights and sat on a park bench in the snow. I wrote him a letter and waited for my friends to call from the wake. He was loved, respected, feted, awarded and adored by many. He had been by my side for years, and I was acutely aware of how lucky I had been. The last time I’d seen him, in the middle of a working day, he had leant across the lift in our building and kissed my cheek. He comes to me in my dreams, still, and he is always grinning.
Before Icarus fell, he flew.
After my friend Martha left Morgan’s funeral, she walked through David Jones on her way home and the piano player was playing Blue Skies by Irving Berlin, the brilliant New York composer. She wrote to me and sent me the lyrics, about how the sun shines brighter and the days hurry by when you are in love.
It’s true, they fly. Which is why we need to relish the relationships we have, and have had. The astonishing thing to think of is how much of a responsibility we have to guard the moments we do have, and cradle them carefully. We so often have less time than we think; we need to care for each other, deliberately and unrelentingly, when we can.
This is an edited extract from Bright Shining (HarperCollins, $35) by Julia Baird, out November 1.
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