As Jane and Andrew Malcolm sift through photo albums in their parents’ living room, the television silently scrolls through the news headlines.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Prime Minister Tony Abbott appears on screen, and Andrew reaches over to turn up the volume, keen to hear the latest live update on the MH17 plane crash disaster.
Like many Australians, Jane, Andrew and his wife Yuliya Tsekhanovich, have been glued to news about the plane for the past week.
Except for them, the international incident is intensely personal because their mum and stepfather, Carol and Michael Clancy, were on board.
Mr Abbott solemnly announces some of the 298 bodies have now arrived in the Netherlands but warns there are still many weeks ahead in the investigation into the Malaysia Airlines flight downed over war-torn Ukraine.
‘‘When I watch the news and think of them, I cannot really put it together. It’s just like a dream, and I will wake up and they will come back from holidays.’’
‘‘It’s quite possible that many bodies are still out there, in the open in the European summer subject to the ravages of heat and the elements,’’ Mr Abbott says.
‘‘As long as it’s possible that there are any Australian remains out there, we owe it to the families to do our absolute utmost to recover them.’’
‘‘This is our lives now,’’ Jane says, reflecting on how public her family’s grief and loss has become.
‘‘It’s just all encompassing.’’
Even a trip to McDonald’s, designed to fill the empty pit in her stomach with comforting junk food, provides no respite.
‘‘I walk into McDonald’s and there’s my mother on the TV,’’ she says.
‘‘I was struggling to eat and I thought, yep, junk food and it’s there on the screen the size of this wall, the sound blasting out at 300 decibels.
‘‘I asked for an extra sweet and sour sauce and if they could turn the TV down because my mum was on that flight.
‘‘My life is just like that now.’’
❏❏❏
Amid the unbearable headlines and graphic footage of the crash site, Jane, Andrew and Yuliya are determined to hold on to good memories of Carol and Michael.
They want to share their personal recollections of the kind and loving Kanahooka couple, both retired teachers who were married for 22 years, so these might prevail over the horror.
For Yuliya, who migrated to Australia from Belarus to marry Andrew about three years ago, Carol’s death has been just as cruel as if she’d lost her own mother.
Although she jokingly remembers her mother-in-law being hesitant about her son marrying a ‘‘Russian girl’’ at first, Yuliya says she was quickly welcomed into the family.
Carol in particular helped Yuliya settle in Australia, teaching her English and taking her shopping for a wedding dress because none of her family could travel from Minsk – the capital of her small landlocked homeland, which is wedged between Russia and Ukraine – to attend the wedding.
‘‘When I came to Australia, at first I couldn’t drive. She was taking me everywhere – to find shoes, dress, just anything I needed for the wedding,’’ she said.
‘‘When I talk to my girlfriends, they complain about their mother-in-law, but I was always like, ‘My mother-in-law is the best in the world’.
‘‘I feel happy that she loved me when she met me, and that I’m from a different culture but it didn’t matter. We became so close.’’
The 29-year-old is devastated Carol and Michael will never meet her future children, and that they didn’t get the chance to meet her mother, who was due to travel to Australia for the first time at the end of this year.
‘‘They were really waiting for her to come, so they could meet her finally,’’ Yuliya said.
‘‘Carol was even doing a course to learn Russian.’’
Describing her mother-in-law as someone ‘‘who was so good and kind to everyone I sometimes wondered if she ever had a bad thought’’, Yuliya has trouble reconciling that image with the MH17 crash.
‘‘When I watch the news and think of them, I cannot really put it together,’’ she said.
‘‘It’s just like a dream, and I will wake up and they will come back from holidays.’’
For Andrew, 35, the cruel irony of how geographically linked his mother and Yuliya’s mother were in the aftermath of the plane disaster brings him to tears.
‘‘It just feels really strange that after all this, where it’s crashed – and with my mum and Yuliya’s mum – they’ve ended up so close, but they will never get to see each other,’’ he said.
Between waves of grief, the family has tried to focus on the good that has emerged since last Friday.
Andrew hopes the international negotiations which have occurred since the death of his mother and stepfather – both of whom abhorred any kind of hatred, racism or war – might have some small effect on the tensions between Ukraine and Russia.
‘‘[Mum and Michael] would be happy – well, I’m sure they would be happy to be alive – but if it’s not a complete waste and their deaths ended up meaning something, I think they would be happy,’’ he said.
Jane, 37, has concentrated on noticing small acts of kindness and believes daily acts of common decency outweigh any act of terror.
After watching footage from the crash site, she has an affinity with Ukrainian villagers who, like her, had this horrific incident thrust upon them without warning. ‘‘There was one lady interviewed and she had this little boy that they had brought to her,’’ Jane said.
‘‘She just said: ‘We don’t want this, we just want to eat borscht and eat pierogies and raise our children’.
‘‘That’s what we want, we would love to do that. And Andrew does a mean borscht too.’’
❏❏❏
In the Clancys’ quiet living room, the doorbell rings.
A man from Wollongong’s Honda dealership is standing at the door, clutching a huge bunch of yellow flowers.
He’s also dropping off one of Carol and Michael’s cars, both of which were parked in their driveway unable to be moved because no-one could find the keys.
Turns out there are some things which are easier when the whole world knows your parents have died.
‘‘I rang Honda up, and they called us back and just said leave them with us,’’ Jane said.
‘‘They towed it, reprogrammed the key, and now they’ve brought us flowers.
‘‘It just makes such a difference, because it’s so hard to deal with that stuff.
‘‘When it goes right, I guess it’s something to do and keeps your mind off it, but when it goes wrong, it’s just too hard.
‘‘At a time when you kind of worry that you’ve lost a bit of faith in humanity, the little things like that help you get through.’’