A personal journey through grief, love, loss and resilience, sharing what helped me move through heartbreak and find hope again, and again, one baby step at a time.
Grief cracks your heart wide open. It’s ugly, beautiful, lonely and universal, all at once. I used to think grief was something you ‘got through.’ Like a finish line you’d eventually reach if you just kept running. Now I know it’s something you carry beside you, like one of those big shopping bags on wheels, teaching you how to live bigger, love harder, and hold on to the good stuff with both hands.
This is my story about grief; how it broke me, shaped me, and taught me how to ride the waves.
Grief has no rulebook (but it does have five stages)
If you’ve ever Googled grief at 2am, you’ve probably heard of the five stages:
1. Denial: Feeling numb or shocked, like your brain is protecting you from the full weight of the loss.
2. Anger: When I arrived home to flowers from friends, they were already starting to die. I felt a surge of anger, how could someone bring something into my house that would just die too? Unhinged, I know, but in grief, everything hurts.
3. Bargaining: Playing mental ‘what if’ games, like wondering if we’d just done this, would they still be here? Wishing with everything you have that you could change the outcome, even though deep down you know you can’t.
4. Depression: Deep sadness, loneliness or hopelessness as the reality of the loss settles in.
5. Acceptance: Finding a way to live with the grief, making peace with the loss even though the sadness may never completely disappear.
I’d love to tell you each stage arrives neatly, like carefully delivered packages. They don’t. Grief is messy and inconsiderate. It’s one step forward, ten steps back, a bit of bargaining, some rage-cleaning your kitchen, followed by lying on the floor wondering how your world will ever be the same again. Long story short: it won’t be. But that’s not always a bad thing.
My early lessons in grief
When I was sixteen, my step-grandfather passed away after battling cancer. If I’m honest, his death didn’t hit me the way I thought it might. I watched my Nanny’s face over this time; the relief, the weight lifted, and I realised that sometimes death brings freedom depending on what the person who died was like. She found new life after loss: playing golf, bridge, getting out into the world. In her own way, she taught me that healing doesn’t always look like sadness. Sometimes healing looks like lunch with friends, laughing so hard your cheeks ache. Nanny Jean’s laugh could do that to you.
Losing my Poppa: My first true experience with grief
2013 was the year I really met grief. My beautiful Poppa, my mum’s dad, passed away. He was a man who cared more about sunsets and family more than how much was in his bank account. He was also the one who passed down my love for driving off into the sunset in a camper, chasing freedom and the simple joys of life. Losing him hurt deeply. Looking back, I don’t think I knew how to show up properly for my mum. I was so inexperienced with death that I didn’t have the tools to be the support she deserved. But we stumbled through it together, all of us, somehow finding small pockets of light in the dark.
Losing my mum: How grief broke me and altered the course of my life forever
Let me tell you about my mum, she was the epitome of strength and hope. She had already lived through more than most: she had divorced, remarried, lost babies. She and dad survived the catastrophic Black Saturday fires in Marysville in 2009, escaping with just their trailer and their lives, losing friends and the caravan park they had spent a decade building. I watched my mum put one foot in front of the other through all of it. Challenges didn’t beat her; she would start over, find another way, or simply find something that kept her going. Later, she was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer and a hereditary lung condition called alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. Still, nothing stopped her. She travelled, visited me in Hong Kong, explored the city with her oxygen machine in tow, and lived every moment she could. Her spirit was unbreakable. She taught me that life isn’t about feeling sorry for yourself, it’s about showing up anyway and making the most of what you do have.
In 2019, life turned upside down. I was living overseas in Hong Kong with my husband and kids, thousands of kilometres away from my family. When my mum was back in Adelaide to help move my Nanna into a nursing home, she was unwell with a tummy bug, so I offered to fly home and help Dad and Nanna pack up the old home. When I arrived, I had a gut feeling something wasn’t right. I lay beside her on the bed, hugging her. She smiled and told me how happy she was that Dad and I were getting along. She said their new puppy, Kingston, was going to take good care of Dad. At one point, she whispered quietly she felt like she was dying. But we say that sometimes, don’t we? When we feel so sick we joke that we’re dying. Why didn’t I see it for what it really was??
I wanted to call a doctor or an ambulance, but was reassured it would be fine. It was just a tummy bug. So once we were all packed up and Nanna was settled into her nursing home room, I got back on a plane.
The call that changed everything
I had only been home less than a day when I got the call to come straight back. Mum had collapsed in the caravan on the journey home. She was rushed to hospital and was now in kidney failure; there was nothing more they could do. She had Sepsis. Dad said, “Get on the next flight and hopefully you’ll make it in time to say goodbye.” Wait, what? Goodbye? The shock, the confusion, the disbelief… I didn’t know how to process it.
The whole family boarded the next available flight. I watched everyone fall asleep around me on that overnight journey, everyone except me. I was a mess of emotions, unable to settle. Eventually I fell into a restless sleep, but I woke around 5am to the strangest, most haunting feeling that I’ve never been able to completely explain. The space around my neck and head felt cold, hollow, empty, as though something that had always been there had disappeared.
Deep down, I knew.
When we landed, a message on my phone simply said, “Have you spoken to your Dad yet?” I knew what it meant. But it had to come from him.
We got off the plane and went straight to the baggage carousel. I called Dad. Between sobs, he said, “Mum’s gone.”
I collapsed to the floor, howling into my hands. All of my deepest fears and heartbreak poured out of me while my family crouched around trying to hold me together. I crumpled onto the cold floor, my cries echoing through the crowded baggage hall. Maybe some people looked with sympathy, maybe others with confusion, it didn’t matter. In that moment, my world had split apart, and nothing else even existed. I’d lost my mother. My best friend. My compass.
An avalanche of grief
Mum passed away in a small town along the Murray River, fitting, in a way, because our family holidays had always been spent by the river. It felt almost as if she chose this place herself, drawing us all together one last time. My brother and his family, my Nanna, my husband and our kids, and Dad, we were all there, side by side, by the water, just as we had been so many times before. All together, for Mum.
From that moment on, life was never the same. Just two days after Mum passed, my Grandpa also passed away back home. We were still in another state, preparing for Mum’s funeral, when we got the news. We couldn’t even attend his farewell. It felt like an avalanche of grief, too much, too fast, and utterly impossible to process all at once.
Grieving my old life and rediscovering myself
Losing Mum shattered everything I thought I knew. It woke me up to the parts of my life that weren’t right; my marriage, my dreams, my future plans that weren’t really mine. (I’ve since learned that in grief you should probably not make life-altering decisions, that grief can make you do all sorts of things.) I left my husband, I moved back to Australia, I started over with zero dollars and a broken heart and I grieved everything. All at once: my mum, my Grandpa, my marriage, my old life. Some days, grief felt insurmountable. Other days, it was just a quiet ache watching me from the rear view.
In those early months after Mum passed, I made some questionable choices trying to escape the pain, including rushing into meeting someone new and convincing myself I was okay. It took time (and a few hard lessons) to realise that grief can’t be outrun or covered with a bandaid of unhealthy choices. Healing demanded something deeper: patience, honesty, and facing the sadness head-on.
But I kept moving, one foot in front of the other. Because that’s what my mum would have done.
A beautiful goodbye; my Nanna’s final gift
In the years that followed, I had the precious gift of spending time with my Nanna, who was like a mum to me. We talked for hours, solved the world’s problems over cups of coffee, and just sat together in the beautiful, ordinary way you do when you know time is precious.
When she passed in 2024, it was heartbreaking. In some ways, it hurt more than losing my mum, it was like losing Mum all over again and then some. But at her funeral, something magical happened.
After the service, while the adults wandered off to eat biscuits and swap stories, the great-grandkids and cousins stayed behind. Our kids sat in a big circle on the carpet in front of Nanna’s casket, playing with bundles of pink and white wool that the funeral home had provided to honour her love of crochet. They laughed, they smiled and they made friendship bracelets. It was joy, wrapped inside sorrow. Life, continuing. It made my heart so full, and Nanna would have loved that.
How I live with grief now
Grief never really goes away. But you can learn to walk beside it.
I imagine myself on a raft, riding the waves: the big ones that threaten to knock me under, the tiny ones that just rock the boat. Sometimes I fall off. Sometimes I ride high with my hands in the air. But I always get back on.
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago, that motto came back in full force: One foot in front of the other, until it’s done. And it carried me through again.
When everything feels heavy, I come back to my constants, the small, grounding truths that never change. There’s a great quote in the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks, he finds motivation in the possibility of a new day and says, “So now I know what I have to do. I have to keep breathing. And tomorrow the sun will rise, and who knows what the tide will bring.”
Those words have sat with me for 25 years now. So I go to the beach, I feel the sand between my toes, the water on my feet, the sun on my face. I remind myself that there is always a new day, always a chance to start again, to keep going.
To hope.
The love that lives on all around me
I carry my mum, my Poppa, my Nanna’s, my Grandpa’s… all of them with me, every single day. They’re in the way I hug my kids, that one funny look my daughter gives me and her eyes look like my Mum looking right back at me.. the way I chase sunsets and campfires, the way I put one wobbly foot in front of the other when things get hard. Their lessons are etched into my bones.
Grief is hard. It’s lonely. It’s scary.
But it’s also a doorway:
- to deeper love
- to fiercer living
- to becoming the person your loved ones would be proud of
- and to keeping their legacy alive.
I know now that grief and happiness can exist side-by-side. And if you let it, grief becomes a reminder that the people you loved most aren’t really gone. They’re right here. In your laughter, in your strength, in your heart, in your children and in everything you do.
