2 April 1999

It has been three years today since our precious Sarah died.

Not only is our daughter very much alive in our memories, but she is also "alive" out there on the net and we love to receive email from people all over the world. In the past three years we have received email from hundreds of people who have found Sarah's page. We cannot tell you how much we enjoy reading these letters as it is the main way we can talk about our girl now. Somehow, it's like she exists out there and we are still able to enjoy her.

Many of the letters simply acknowledge that the reader has seen Sarah's page and send us their kind thoughts. Some of the letters are from people who have also lost a child and are perhaps going what we went through in the early days and our heart goes out to them. We welcome those letters too because we know how important it is sometimes to have someone, anyone, to be able to "talk" to.

One day when Sarah was about 9 she was reading the Readers' Digest and said she'd like a story about her in the magazine. Then after she died Brian found it therapeutic to focus his time and attention into making this Homepage, and I concentrated on writing Sarah's biography. In September 1997 an abbreviated version of Sarah's story "An Angel Only Lent" was published in the Australian Readers' Digest. It has since been published in Holland, Norway, Brazil and Mexico. (If it has been published in any other country please let us know.)

For those of you who may be curious, or who may be also facing the loss of a loved-one, this is a short summary of our family's journey through its grief, and where we are today.

Our oldest son, Brad, is now 17 and has just started his first year at university, studying Computer Systems Engineering and Computer Science. Michael is 15 and is in Year 11.

In the three years since she died, her brothers have rarely spoken about their sister, and to this day they have not looked through her home page or read her Readers Digest article. It has been hard to know how to handle this as they have steadfastly and emphatically resisted any suggestion of counselling. On the surface they seem fine, they have matured and have applied themselves to their schoolwork, always achieving excellent results. In the first year after Sarah died when I was crying nearly every day, the boys were always caring and attentive, making me cups of tea, helping around the house and giving me hugs. They are a little serious at times and not interested in partying, drinking and drugtaking - aware I think that dying is not a pretty thing , but perhaps a little too conservative. I have often wondered if they are the way they are so they don't cause me any more pain, or if it is just the way they would have been anyway. Or sometimes I worry if they have suppressed their feelings because mine have been so raw.

Death and grief affects different families in different ways I suppose. Our family has become a lot more introverted, wanting to stay home together rather than go out. Hopefully, that will change in time. But it has given the four of us a chance to regroup and has allowed our relationships to flourish. Brad and Mike are each others best friend.

From my point of view, my grief for my daughter has affected me in ways I would never have expected. I had no idea that I would go through around 2 years of self hatred. I had no idea that grief didn't just make you feel sad and devastated, but sick to the stomach, lonely, angry, vicious, withdrawn. Grief seemed to affect every emotion and every part of my body so that sometimes I felt like I was losing my grip on the world. But even worse than the pain were the episodes of total blankness, absence of any feeling at all. I felt like my love for my daughter and my whole life were built on a lie.

I look back and see I was very depressed for about 20 months, but didn't realize it at the time. I had no energy for anyone outside of my family. Through those months I kept any niceness at all for Brad, Mike and Brian All the love and good things I felt were directed towards them, nothing left for anyone else. I worked and studied my Japanese putting on a thin veneer of "normality" when I was outside my family. But at any time there was a danger that some trigger would crack the veneer and my grief would be exposed to the public. After a couple of horrible experiences, I would not go to any music or schooling events by myself, and it is only in the last few weeks I am able to go shopping without my husband.

Brian has been my rock. But like many men (and his sons) he does not demonstrate his grief with tears. He is self employed and for a long time after Sarah died he had such trouble focussing and concentrating in his job. I've read since that this is symptomatic of the way many men grieve. He lost all enthusiasm for his job as an accountant and developed a new philosophy - Carpe Diem (seize the day). Firstly he took up eating well and exercising - totally against the grain of the old Brian. Then he sold his business and bought a new, totally different one, celebrating the the new direction of our lives with a trip to Europe - also totally against the old Brian, who hated to spend money!

We started our 7 week backpacking trip with our sons at the end of November 1997 and it was in a carpark in Warwick, England that we belly-laughed for the first time since Sarah started getting sick. We rediscovered our boys' sense of humour that day and had many more days when we laughed together. We had a wonderful time catching trains and staying in hostels as we travelled around Britain and through France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Greece.

We got back to Perth in time for the new School year and after bad times when Sarah should have been entering high school for the first time, and then the second anniversary of her death, and then her 13th birthday, life has become easier. When the pain comes now, it's still like yesterday that she died, but in between times are much further apart. We discovered grief is not an illness that eventually gets cured but it's a pain you learn to live with.

Once I could not think of the future because all I envisioned was blackness, now we know that life goes on. We have learnt to laugh again without feeling guilty and we have begun to plan. We look forward to Brad and Mike leading their own lives and being happy and healthy, and we look forward to being reunited one day with our Sarah.