Grief is an individual experience and one that most people cannot articulate. For Lucy Palmer, a journalist, editor and author, it was an intense, difficult, uplifting time, and this skilled wordsmith takes readers with her on every step of her physical, emotional and spiritual journey. At 38 she was widowed when her husband of only six years, Julian, died from cancer, leaving her with three young children. It was an unusual union, as he – an English-born widower with four grown sons – was 25 years her senior.

They met in Papua New Guinea, where she was working as a journalist. In this splendid memoir, Palmer tells the story of their life together in PNG, where Julian had been a lawyer for many years, as well as in the Southern Highlands of NSW. She is unflinching in her descriptions of his treatments and in the way she and her beloved Julian faced the inevitable. What makes this moving account almost unbearably sad are her poems between some of the chapters.

Palmer’s memoir describes Julian’s death in 2001 in great detail, along with her reaction – numbness, then almost visceral pain, waves of overwhelming sorrow, and what she called in one of her poems, ‘the unspeakable anguish of your absence, the unreachable Heaven of our love’. At times she questioned her sanity, feeling his presence, a hand on her shoulder, words in her ear. When she was single, Palmer completed desert walks from Birdsville to Alice Springs and then west of Alice Springs to Broome. She had vowed to traverse the desert again when she turned 40, but after Julian’s death she realised her life then would be a desert walk in another form.

Calm and now strong again, Palmer is grateful for the threads of unbroken love she still feels, which she shares gracefully and eloquently.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville