Ever since I’d met Oliver, I’d been waiting to hear he had died

Early one evening on a late autumn Sunday, as I lay soaking in a scalding bath, my partner Tom appeared in the doorway. “Jack just called,” he said. “It’s Oliver*.”

There are friends for whom I would have required more information – “What do you mean?” – but I knew immediately that Oliver was dead. Ever since I’d met Oliver, I’d been waiting for Tom to tell me he was dead.

Oliver was one of Tom’s oldest friends. Though they didn’t go to school together, they were part of the same extended network of schoolkids who seemed to move as one, like a giant spider, overwhelming the tram cars of Melbourne’s inner east come 3.30pm each day. When I  met him, in 2011, Oliver was undergoing treatment for oesophageal cancer. He was spindly and drawn, but animated and charming; I instantly adored him, bookmarking him as a potential boyfriend for my best friend, and working up my sales pitch. “He’s delightful,” I told her. “So sharp and attentive.”

There were just two things, I added, nervously. “He has cancer, and he’s an alcoholic.”

Just two things. These two things defined Oliver’s existence when I met him, but by the time he died, it was only the latter. For all the well-documented reasons people drift away from an addict, Tom and I didn’t see much of him in the last four years of his life.

But when Oliver died, the thing that kept us at arm’s length in life – his alcoholism – also died, along with any weary feelings. All that’s left now is a sadness that seems to grow rather than shrink as the months pass, a sharpening sting at what we’ve lost: a boyish, tender imp, who made everyone he knew feel like the best person in the world.

I’ve never had a bigger cheerleader; Oliver hoovered up copies of a book I wrote that mysteriously obsessed him – “It’s so good, Buns!” (it’s not) – handing them out like candy canes to all his relatives at Christmas. Eventually, I gave Oliver an armful of my own copies. In return, he pulled up in the driveway one day and presented me with an enormous veterinary science text, unreadable to the lay person; Oliver came from a family of vets, Tom later reminded me. I binned it immediately, shaking my head: what was he thinking?

I feel ashamed now that I threw it out – what was I thinking? – even though I had no wish to learn about horse musculature. At the time, I took Oliver’s gift as frustrating evidence of just how addled his brain had become. Now I see it as a gesture of gratitude and love, from someone who no longer had very much of anything – material or otherwise – to give.

In the days after his death, Tom and I joked about “what Oliver would want” at his funeral: for his coffin to be wept on by his mates’ mini-skirted wives (Oliver was in love with every woman he ever met); for everyone to get damagingly pissed at his wake. We told ourselves that laughing in the face of death was right up Oliver’s alley: “It’s what he would’ve wanted.”

We’ve stopped making these jokes, now that he’s really gone, as opposed to when he had just died, when he was barely gone, and we felt him laughing with us. Oliver still seemed to be with us when the plans for his funeral were being made, when the WhatsApp group was filling with old photos of him, even if he was, technically, as dead then as he is now.

Oliver and I never really spent that much time together; it’s Tom who’s mourning a lifelong friendship, not me, and I have to remind myself of this every time I drive past his old flat and feel my stomach tighten and knot.

His funeral was held in the towering, domed chapel of his alma mater, its soaring ceilings illuminated by blinding beams of golden sunlight. Raised by atheist parents, I suddenly understood the appeal of a Catholic send-off, the scale and grandeur of the scenery somehow reassuring, as huge and overwhelming as death itself, telegraphing to all in attendance: “This is not a small loss.”

Photos of Oliver filled a screen, tracing a life that should have gone the same way as his siblings – upward and upward, filled with the blessings that come from the combination of a loving family and good education – but did not.

I could write more about his drinking, but how many more descriptions of addiction does the world need? It’s Oliver who was special, not his addiction. Less than two weeks after he died, a friend from my 20s – part of another large, spidery group who crawled across town in the early 2000s – turned up face-down on the bluestones of a city alley.

Jono didn’t have much in common with Oliver, except that he, too, in his younger years, burned with charisma and mischief. Watching Jono being lowered awkwardly into the cold, brown ground, I fought the urge to ask his family to consider a less subterranean resting place. Jono, like Oliver, loved people: he’d want to be up here at ground level, among the action. But I don’t know what Jono and Oliver’s last wishes were. I do know both would want the world to know that, once upon a time, they were the most radiant people in the room – that people were drawn to them, not away from them.

There’s a line in a song I love, an elegy to a lost boy, and I hear it in my head when I think of them both now. “The boy is a bird … the boy is always a much prettier bird than any old girl bird.” You were prettier than any old girl bird, boys, and no less beautiful for your broken wings.

* Name has been changed.

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