It’s as if the rains come to take them away. Grey clouds fading into the blue skies and lingering for the days before but not the days of. And the deluge comes unbroken for a day and a night and another day before easing at the end of the second sunset.

The rain comes with the crack of thunder and white bolts across the dark sky and the pattern has held twice now and it will take a third to really prove anything to you but for now you hold it true. Earth beneath the bitumen roads washes away and cars swerve in the dangerous wet to avoid deepening holes and the wallabies cower beside the house where they hope you will feed them like you have before and where they know they will be safe until the small dog braves the wet to chase them away. This is unlikely.

Instead the dog cowers on the long brown couch and sits and whimpers a few moments ahead of the sharp cracks through the air and you settle in with just your phone for a long scroll because if the power does give out you’ll still have service and light. This is how you pass the first night and the messages come back from the hospital drawn out and quiet and they’re enduring. The night passes with a soft sleep serenaded by the rain and you wonder if you will wake up to news.

You do not.

And the storm continues again with the heaviest of the deluge behind you now and the constant drizzle takes you all the way back to Europe, back to old imperial capitals, where the skies were grey and the days were long and then short and where you left, probably, too early. But you work through it and the emails come and go and the money piles up in the way that you’re still not all too certain about but you’ve been guaranteed this is correct.

As you get to and from the car on the Friday with the hail falling you cannot shake that it will come soon and you never know, even with your practice, whether you’re right.

And then it all ends quietly, as everything seems to this year, and they are still with you. Twice now they seem to have faded with the storms and as the hail melted and came back up into the sky. Their spirits seemed to evaporate with it all.

It’s the day after that they go. Clear blue cloudless skies and you wonder if they know even still on the drip, their consciousness really having gone, probably, with the storm. That unclear intersection between sedated life and death apparently right in that moment when the last of the raindrops fall onto hot ground. Perhaps it is in that mist that they go.

You’re holding out for that third time and in the longer winter months, in the deep nights in the cold, you wondered on the bad days if it would perhaps be yours. But you’re through that now — permanently you hope — and the storm clouds bring them with only reminders and not compulsions. Nostalgia comes with the downpour and it’s in the clear days that you miss them with a heavy heart.