[Jill Ker Conway was raised on Coorain, an Australian ranch. In a time of terrible drought, her father drowned under circumstances that made her suspect he had killed himself. Her family later moved to Sydney. She is now 15. A policeman comes in the middle of the night to tell that her adored older brother Bob, 21, has been killed in a car crash.]
After he left, I was overcome by the need to do my grieving privately for a while. 
I wanted to sit alone and take it in. I also knew it would be a long time before my mother slept peacefully again, and thought she would need her rest for what was awaiting her tomorrow. I sat in the dark in the living room, thinking very clearly. This time I knew no effort at committing a loved face or voice to memory could arrest the passage of time. There would be a time when I couldn't recall his voice and his laugh at will. I might live on a large part of my life without the laughter and the joy he brought into it. As I took in the facts and imagined the battered thatch of golden hair, I felt a sharp physical loss, as though my own body were mutilated. I was literally glad to have time to take in his death alone. It meant that in my incestuous way I could hold on a little longer to something about him which for the moment was mine alone. He had been like the sun in my universe, and most of my aspirations at school and in my daily life had centered on winning his approval. Now there were not just my father's wishes to be carried out in his absence, but Bob's too. I realized I would always be trying to live out his life for him.
[She wakes her other brother, Barry, and tells him.]
Downstairs, we sat together again, waiting out the night, just as we had waited out the day of our father's death together. As the first light came, it struck me like a blow that the sun would soon rise on a world without Bob....While Barry went to make his phone call, I crept about the kitchen to make us hot tea. When he returned we drank it, our lips chattering against the cups from cold and shock. After he left I settled in to wait, watcing the sun rise, staring at the new day in frozen sorrow. We had thought there could be no greater grief than the loss of our father, but there was and it was upon us. I knew with foreboding how it would affect our mother.
...my mother...looked like a character in a fairy story on whom a sudden spell has been cast. She said in an incredulous voice to no one in particular, "But he was my first baby." We nodded and then they set out.
[Chapter 6]
After my brother Bob's death, it seemed as though I had lost the capacity for emotional responses. Daily life was in black and white, like a badly made film. My trancelike state excluded music, feeling, color, desire. Although on the surface I was doing well, I was actually going through each day like an automaton....I gave up athletic competition because during the practice hours after school I was haunted by the knowledge of my mother, alone at home. I often came in to find her just sitting gazing into space.
I never touched the keys of a piano again, nor could I listen to music. When I heard something Bob had played or that we had listened to together I could not manage the feelings of grief that swept over me. Just as with our departure from Coorain, my consciousness had retreated to a great distance. It was hard to bring it back to earth unless I was concentrating every energy on some difficult intellectual effort. I came to love my hours of homework because when I finally sat down alone in my room with my books, I could get my mind and body together again, and escape the discomfort of watching the world from the other side of some transparent but impenetrable window. At school I laughed when people told jokes...but I could not really participate. When we went to the theater, I sat physically in the stalls but was emotionally somewhere up with the lighting tracks and girders of the building....
If we were sad, [our mother] was distraught. I often wondered if it would be better to rend one's garments and tear one's hair to express grief. My mother was quiet, but frozen....
We never spoke about Bob, or about our mother's worrisome state. We enjoyed the quiet, unspoken communication of two inarticulate but devoted people.
--Jill Ker Conway (1934-), The Road From Coorain
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