It is one of those cemeteries in country town Australia, well-kept in certain areas: rich and green and respectfully tended, and a bit messier in other sections. I don't think this is a split down religious lines, but I could be wrong. Maybe it's a generational thing. We have travelled for three hours in a fast and comfortable car from the city to get here. In mute horror and utter dread at what we were in for. That was separate to our consideration of grief. Something so brutal about the procedure of burying a coffin in the ground. Worse than that lowering down into the flames of hell that happens with cremations. Our grandfather, who had always wanted to be burned or tossed out with the rubbish, unconcerned about his body's next phase, became sentimental and fearful as he was dying of throat cancer and insisted then that he wanted to be peacefully buried, not burned. I've suffered enough, he told his family.   All of these people on display, required to enable the ritual to happen. Grave diggers on duty. We are required to stand out here in the open and do the deed. It is the middle of winter and it has been raining all day. Our path is slippery; the ground around the hole where we are standing is muddy. But this isn't why the women in the family - mother and sisters to the dead girl - all slide in after the big shiny coffin. That is grief, a jump in solidarity, towards her. Each of them needs to be restrained by someone stronger than them, in each case a man, but for a while it looked dangerous. I don't need to repeat how distressing this is.   Some of the mourners were clever enough to take tranquilizers that are now having an effect; pills handed out liberally.   You are not present here: you have gone. What we have left are photographs and memories of funny times, of the pleasurable parts of our childhoods that we had only just emerged from.   But my grandmother Ena is present. When she was your age, she was a transgressor too. She had a baby and she wasn't married or, properly, prepared. She attended this funeral, the burying of her grand daughter, and nobody knew how similar her experience had been.   Looking back at this terrible day, I don't recall that there was a service, just the movement between a sister's house in that town and the cemetery, and back again before the silent drive home. I don't know what I was thinking. I place it in a time when I was living for the first time away from home, in my first rented shared house. The first house mate, who had encouraged us to make the move , had lasted only a few weeks before her boyfriend talked her into moving in with him. This was the first of her minor betrayals, enacted with a flourish and her characteristic attention to maximising conflict. Then I shared with F, who was fucking a different man every night: perhaps that is an exaggeration, but it was at least five men per week.   Even when we are together as an extended family with three generations of us, there is a fracture of purpose, an unease that we seem to have been carrying with us all of our lives. Too much unspoken, it holds us all back. I look at us, on the night of Christmas and later in the photograph albums we insist upon and I see this longing in each and every one of us to open up, to let go of all of the bunched-up matter we carry. Perhaps to talk about Julie. The lines of the family show in our faces. A little collection of distinction: features passed along the generations. The only connection we have. The voices of the family; bleatings, little of coherence, almost no written records.   You are being buried in the ground and we are here to witness it, your full family. This was my first funeral, but I only consider that years later. This little town might have something to do with your death.   It has taken us hours to travel here and it is a bloody nightmare. So hard to imagine your silence. Those people clever enough to have taken some of the tranquilizers handed out by the pill monitors are much calmer now. It has quietened them; it makes your burial possible. What next?