When I had first arrived in Australia, Marieke was working as an administration assistant in a community art gallery. It was the summer holidays. I was yet to make any friends. Each morning, I followed Marieke into town and she dropped me at the State Library. I spent hours there poring over books and old newspapers and dog-eared magazines, indulging in my strange infatuation. I learned that there are five stages of drowning, that clinical death can occur after four minutes of complete submersion. I learned that even after successful resuscitation, some victims continue to experience breathing difficulties, hallucinations and confusion. Approximately ninety per cent of drownings occur in freshwater lakes, rivers and swimming pools. The remaining ten per cent take place in sea water.

People who have drowned and been brought back describe the experience as ‘surreal’. They liken it to sitting in a darkened theatre, watching themselves as actors going through the motions on screen. First comes disbelief – the mind and body struggling for dominance, one refusing to acknowledge how serious the situation is while the other searches frantically for a source of oxygen, rapidly leading to a semi-conscious state. Doctors describe this as ‘the breaking point’ – the moment where chemical sensors inside the body trigger an involuntary breath that drags water into the windpipe. After that comes shock and then the grave acceptance of their inevitable fate: a kind of surrendering.

These accounts had made me shiver even as I devoured them. Was this what my parents experienced in their final moments? The enduring mystery – that I would never know their last thoughts – had haunted me well into adulthood. There was one thing I was sure of, though. When death had rushed headlong into the salt plains of Saeftinghe, flooding the sea asters and scurvy grass verging the isolated hiking trail where they’d chosen to walk that day without a guide, their last moments hadn’t been spent worrying about what would happen to me. I was their burden. They’d always made that perfectly clear.

Swinging my bag over my shoulder, I walked towards the carpark, passing the small group keeping silent vigil over the man’s body. There was nothing to be done. The police would check his identification and notify his next of kin as they had when my parents had passed. I had been spared the horror of having to identify them because my best friend’s father offered to do it for me. I was grateful to him then, as I was grateful for a good many things Bram’s family did for me, providing stability where none existed.