"I’m representative of something that’s unbearable to humanity"

Supporting a taonga for the grieving

Content warning: This post talks about bereavement after suicide. Please take care.

One of the special things that has come from the horror and torture of losing my dear friend Lou, is the love I have for their mum Fiona and our blossoming friendship.

We are two mums finding our way in the world, but she is navigating a world without one of her children. It is an unfathomable grief, a grief too big for words to lose a child. Especially to suicide. Suicide has a stigma so large it eats any words that try to form in its shadow.

Fiona, just like her beautiful child Lou, is insisting on finding words and bringing those words into the light. Just like Lou, she is creating art that speaks truth to power, to hold space, to provide the gentlest comfort, to rage.

“I had to get words around losing our Lou. I had to do it for me. I’m not a poet you know, I’d love to be. I don’t write poetry, but I sat there for hours and hours in dumb struck shock, traumatised and I just had to write,” she says.

“Everybody says ‘I have no words, I have no words for you’, and the thing is: You don’t want words for this, because it’s too horrible.”

“For me I was in a space of needing words and being afraid of words.”

Writing gives Fiona “a place to go” in her crushing grief. “I am staring right at this thing that’s happening to us. And I’m making a thing out of this truth of what’s happening to me.”

When Lou died, a close friend of theirs provided Fiona with resources to support her, including a recommended reading: Poet Iona Winter’s book Gaps in the Light.

Fiona contacted The Women’s Bookshop to source the book, they couldn’t find it and passed on Iona’s email.

Iona is one of our country’s most stunning poets. She lost her child Reuben Winter to suicide in 2020 during the pandemic. Her writing on surviving this has been of huge release, comfort, and taonga to so many.

It was a huge comfort to Fiona. “It was kind of miraculous how it all came about. The bookshop giving me her email, I thought ‘Do you I know how much I need this?’”.

Fiona and Iona started to write to each other “like old fashioned pen pals”. They connected, deeply. When Iona put out a call for poems. Fiona answered the call.

“I’m representative of something that’s unbearable to humanity,” Fiona says. “I needed to not allow that to be my story.”

When Lou died, Fiona came home and pulled out all of her poetry books searching for any words of comfort. “I couldn’t find anything that spoke to me. You’re looking for language to give shape to this awful thing”.

She began to write.

“I went back and forth. I was scared of these poems. I thought I can’t put these poems into the world, but then I thought, I don’t know that the world has ever been served by that idea that if we can’t face it so we won’t. That has not led us into great places.”

Photo by NASA

In 2022, Iona Winter received the CLNZ / NZSA Writers’ Award to write a non-fiction book on being suicide bereaved. She opened submissions for an almanac a liminal gathering on grief and received well over 200 submissions.

“Grief by its very essence is a universal experience,” Iona says. Her call was answered by 103 artists, poets, photographers, musicians, storytellers, and visual artists from diverse backgrounds, ages, creative ability and expression.

Iona says a liminal gathering celebrates the destigmatisation of grief, by making it relatable through multiple creative lenses. It seeks to normalise the various ways grief can be expressed.

“The almanac seeks to provide comfort, and act as a taonga to be shared between loving hands, during difficult times.”

But to have this resource in the world - Ioana and the community of bereaved need support. They have started a Boosted campaign.

This Boosted campaign, if successful, will raise funds for the printing of a liminal gathering, and to provide a small koha of $50 to 103 contributing artists - including making their copies available at cost.

Iona is donating her time, energy, and aroha for all the behind-the-scenes mahi free - out of love and passion for the kaupapa.

Providing a safe space for grief and a place to house the enormity of the pain of losing your child, is so important. Especially when standard one-size-fits-all advice does not provide comfort.

I hear Lou when I speak to Fiona. It’s the specific kind of warm angry Lou had. The rage that came from the best part of them. The softest and kindest part of them.

“I want art. I do not want expertise” Fiona says, referencing her inbox full of grief inspo. “Art comforts my soul. People telling me that there are, or are not, stages of grief makes me want to commit violence,” she laughs down the phone.

I can relate. I’m not an advice person. I need art and poetry and words.

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This year, I have lost three friends to suicide. Grief for a loved one who ended their own life is a separate kind of bereavement. It shakes your core; makes you feel so unstable on your feet. You spend so much time wondering - What if.

There’s guilt, shame, blame, and just the deepest pain.

There’s rarely a day that goes by that I don’t think about Lou. When I talk about them to friends and family, I hear their stories of loved ones who died by suicide.

Their experiences are so unique but universal. In many ways death reminds me so much of birth. I remember so distinctly walking around the supermarket when I had a brand-new baby and wondering how the world just…. goes on. Your life is impossibly different. But everything else is the same.

You walk through life exhausted, bruised, trying to put one foot in front of the other - it’s much like grief. But the sludge of exhausted newborn life gives way to joy, and I don’t know if there’s another side from grief let alone whether there’s joy there.

What I do know is that talking helps. That sharing helps. That we don’t share and talk enough about it all.

Fiona agrees, “when I speak out loud, art and beauty feel absolutely fundamental”.

None of us know what is on the other side of grief, or if there is even an other side. But we don’t journey alone. Finding words to bring you comfort as you travel with the pain is crucial.