A Mother's Story

by Rosie Batty

  We all need to take a look at ourselves. Because change begins with each one of us.

  28

  Grief

  Diary Entry

  Monday 11 August 2014

  My first journal entry since Luke’s death. Don’t know why I haven’t written before now – just haven’t made the time or wanted to connect with myself this way until now.

  What am I feeling today? Today has not been so painful, but when I’m on top of a meditation hill and see the sky and clouds, mountains and vast beautiful scenery, I feel the pain. The huge sense of loss.

  Where is Luke? Is he high above the clouds, looking out safely from a tree way up where no one can see and where he is safe from the world?

  Why can’t I reach out to touch him? To call out to him. To laugh with him. To get cross with him. To just enjoy his presence. I know why I haven’t written before now – it’s too painful. Too real. Too raw. I WANT HIM BACK!!! I so want him back.

  I talk out loud to him all the time – and that helps. I have tried to remember all the holidays we’ve had, the trips to England. It fills me with so much pain I think I might burst.

  I can only bear to think about all those things so much.

  When will I ever be able to remember him without so much pain? When will I be able to see a photo of his beautiful blue eyes and gorgeous face without sobbing out loud? When will I stop feeling this pain?

  It is too hard. I am better to be busy and distracted – only letting bursts of grief to break through occasionally throughout the day rather than letting the grief consume me.

  I feel cheated that all my memories of Luke will be forever painful. That the photos and videos I have will always bring tears.

  Why did I never sit with Luke and share all our photo albums together? I know he looked at them alone sometimes without saying.

  I do wish that I had thought to make the time to do that.

  All the videos of his life too. I guess you think that one day you will, but there’s no rush. Then it’s too late and now the thought of watching them is too painful. But still. I have them for one day. One day when the pain isn’t so intense. But how long will it take? How long will it be before my entire day is not spent thinking of Luke and feeling the pain of his loss?

  All the things I shall no longer be able to share and all the things I shall no longer be able to do. I am no longer a mother and it hurts like hell.

  Why me? Why Luke? Fucking, fucking Greg.

  How could he have done this? I still feel no hatred – just total sadness. Disbelief. Sadness and more sadness. When will it fucking end?

  *

  I have not yet had a moment where I have been inconsolable over Luke – where I have just fallen apart. I know I did when my eighteen-year-old cat died, but it hasn’t happened yet over my son. So whether that is still to come, I don’t know.

  The body is quite an amazing instrument. When I met Gill Hicks, the Adelaide woman who lost both her legs in the London bombings, I was struck by what an incredibly strong, positive person she was. And she told me it took her seven years before she became inconsolable – before her body allowed her to process the full enormity of what had happened to her. Before then, she figured, her body had decided she wasn’t up for it. She wouldn’t have been able to handle it. And I wonder if that is the same with me. I wonder if perhaps at some level, my body knows that the horror of what I have experienced is so great, that I need to put a certain amount of time between myself and my loss before it will allow me to completely break down.

  I believe, if it happens to me like that, it will happen when it is safe for me to do so, when I can cope with it. I am not in denial; I am not disengaged. But there is a point that I can’t get past. I can start to feel emotional and I can start to tear up, but I can’t seem to let myself go. I am so busy holding back this wave of emotion that my body is scared is going to drown me. I wonder when I am going to stop constantly thinking about Luke. Because even when I am not thinking about him, I am thinking about him.

  And then there are the small mercies. I didn’t see Luke be killed. I think about women like Ingrid Poulson. She came across the bodies of her children and father just after they had been murdered: I am grateful that that is something I have never had to deal with.

  I think of the pain the Morcombes have to deal with – the fact that Daniel was kidnapped and probably in fear of his life for hours before he was killed. And I am grateful that Luke’s death was instant: that he would not have been in pain and if there had been fear, it would mercifully have been fleeting.

  And I think of the mother of Darcey Freeman, who was thrown off the West Gate Bridge by her father, and the mother of those three Farquharson boys who were driven into a dam by their father: and I am grateful that Greg is dead. I don’t think I would cope if Luke was dead and Greg was still alive.

  So you do look at these things – these small mercies – and say, yes I was in the worst situation in my life, but I am still grateful I was spared a lot of other pain. For how else do you go on?

  I’ve only ever taken a few sleeping tablets, and those in the weeks immediately following Luke’s death. I was offered valium, but I worried that, once I started it, I might not ever get off it. I chain-smoked in the weeks immediately after his death, and I remember drinking a lot more than I usually would but, even then, I wasn’t writing myself off. I’m still on my anxiety medication, the same one I have been taking since Greg’s harassment of me really escalated. But otherwise, I am medication-free.

  I don’t live in a vacuum. I’m aware that some people find my reaction to Luke’s death unusual. As if there is a ‘usual’ way to react in my situation. They point to my extraordinary performance in front of the TV cameras the morning after Luke’s death, and they say there’s something not right about that woman. They look at me standing up to receive awards, like Australian of the Year, or make speeches about family violence to auditoriums full of people, and they think I’m cold or unfeeling or robotic. They don’t see me crying myself to sleep every evening. They’re not with me during those moments – and they happen every day – when I am overcome with such grief that I have to take myself off somewhere for a quiet cry.

  The irony, of course, is that, when it comes to my feelings, I am a private person. Whether it’s through being raised by a father who is not demonstrative, or because of a lifetime spent trying not to allow myself to be vulnerable, I’m not much for wearing my vulnerability on my sleeve. Open and honest, yes. But outwardly demonstrative, no – that’s not my style.

  I’ve spoken to friends in the media about it, and they point to Lindy Chamberlain, and the trial by media she endured because she refused to grieve in a way the Australian public thought she ought to. But there are no rule books for people like me. It’s not as if there is a set of accepted behaviours for mothers who were 50 metres away when their ex-partner brutally murdered their son. I cope as best I can, feeling my way as I go.

  There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t miss Luke. And it’s a pain that can be triggered by the most mundane things. A trip to the supermarket when I automatically reach for the cereal he used to like or the bananas he used to eat. A visit to a café where a mother is cradling a newborn. The sight of Luke’s former classmates, trooping up the hill to school – marching on into their respective futures. The wave will come crashing down, and for a moment, I am breathless and drowning. Until I can see the surface and I swim back up for air.

  Of course, there are times when I lose it completely and take down anyone who happens to be in my vicinity. Sometimes the trigger is obvious, sometimes it is seemingly trivial. The only constant is that when the fall comes, it is spectacular and can leave those in the line of fire licking their wounds. Like the poor shop assistant on the day before Luke’s funeral when I couldn’t find the shoe I wanted in my size. Or the hapless stylist at a magazine photo shoot who had brought the wrong size clothes. Or the person who happened to be using a leaf blower outside my house
, or the friend who was using a vacuum in my house in the days after Luke’s death. At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable for me to scream and rant and rave at them all. But in hindsight, I realise it wasn’t. Even now, eighteen months later, I spend every moment of every day suppressing something, be it a fleeting thought or a flood of tears. It is so constant I don’t even know I’m doing it. And then, sometimes, it all just bubbles to the surface and I explode, bringing people down around me. I’m not especially proud of it, but nor am I in a position to really control it. I am suffering from post-traumatic stress.

  Six months after Luke was killed, I went to a health retreat in the Hunter Valley. It was one of those places where you leave your phone at the door and spend a week detoxing: undertaking classes and diets and exercise regimes to hopefully find again whatever equilibrium you may have lost. People kept telling me I needed to ‘take time to grieve’, as if I had been spending my days since his death wilfully ignoring the fact my only child was no longer in my life and had been taken from me in the most heinous of circumstances. I knew my body was drained, I knew I was physically and emotionally exhausted, and so I thought two weeks spent eating well, doing exercise and otherwise being still – away from home and in an environment purpose-built for taking stock – could be just what the doctor ordered. It turned out to be all of that and more, and I emerged two weeks later, if not a different person, at least a marginally less damaged one.

  But what I wasn’t prepared for was being in the company of people who didn’t know my story. And being confronted by the simplest of questions. I had spent six months surrounded by friends and family. Or if not friends and family, any number of people who life had sent my way expressly because of Luke’s death: journalists, politicians, social workers, domestic violence campaigners. So it was confronting to sit at dinner with fellow guests at the health retreat and be asked the questions strangers ask one another when they are thrust into a situation of forced intimacy.

  ‘So Rosie, tell us about yourself. Do you have any kids?’ came the enquiry one night from someone sitting at the next table.

  I was stumped. It was the simplest question in the world, the most innocuous of enquiries – and yet it took my breath away. Being a mother had been a fundamental part of who I was. Was I still a mother? And if I was no longer a mother, what was I? An ex-mother? A former mother? What did I answer?

  ‘Yes, I do. I mean, I am. I mean, I did have kids. A little boy.’ I heard myself reply to confused looks, the usual wave of emotion rising in me. ‘But he passed away.’

  Did I have the energy to go through with an explanation? Could I face the trauma of going over it all again with relative strangers? And if so, to what possible end? I had been here before. I would explain what happened, I would watch as these people struggled to know how to respond and then I would feel obliged to ease their discomfort by telling them it was fine – when patently it was not.

  And so I learned to modify my small talk, to only reveal to strangers what I felt capable of dealing with on any given day. Sometimes it felt bad to deny I was a mother, as if I was somehow dishonouring the memory of Luke, but for the sake of expediency – and my own mental wellbeing – it was occasionally easier just to let it go.

  *

  Luke’s old school, Flinders Christian Community College, is only half a kilometre from my home. Down a gentle hill, past the neatly kept gardens of my neighbours, set at the top of a series of nearby paddocks that stretch to Tyabb and roll eventually down to the sea at Hastings. Every morning around 8.30 am and every afternoon around 3 pm, I see kids in uniform walking past my front gate. I know the uniform well – white shirt, grey shorts. I used to wash it twice a week, hang it from my clothesline out the back. The kids are also familiar to me – faces from Luke’s class. Except that they are all changing slowly: morphing from children to teenagers. All gangly limbs and maturing features. All getting on with the business of growing up and becoming adults, fulfilling the potential their parents have spent the past thirteen years nurturing. And it is a peculiar kind of torture. I think of my Luke, frozen in time. Forever eleven – never to go through puberty, never to have another growth spurt, his face never to shuck off the softness of boyhood as he develops into a man. Never to don a backpack and take off around the world, never to experience the highs of first love, never to have his heart broken.

  While I was initially comforted on the day of Luke’s funeral to see life go on for other parents and children, I found myself resenting other parents for many months afterwards. I would be angry that they dared go on with their lives when mine had been placed in limbo. It used to upset me that other mums and dads blithely went about the business of raising their kids in my orbit. How could they be so insensitive? But then I realised how unreasonable I was being and that, if I was to have any peace, I needed to confront this irrational feeling and come to terms with the fact that while my world has been brought to a standstill, everyone else’s has to go on.

  It makes me wonder whether it’s better to stay here in Tyabb, where at every turn there is something to remind me of Luke, or move somewhere where I won’t be constantly reminded of him. Every time I look at the pool in the backyard, I think Luke will never swim in it again. Every time I drive past the basketball courts, I think Luke will never shoot hoops there again. Every time I pass his bedroom, I think Luke will never sleep in there again. And it’s the silence that slowly eats away at me. A house that was once full of noise now lies mostly silent. I sometimes feel like it is closing in on me. How can I stay here with his memories haunting me daily? But then how could I ever move on and leave them behind?

  Because that’s what is scary too. The idea that with every day that passes, he dims a little in my memory. My recollection of events gets foggier. In fact, it is my greatest fear. That, one by one, the memories are going to fade and this most perfect creation of mine – this most wonderful light that I nurtured and gifted to the world – will be forever extinguished. And it terrifies me. Sometimes I even have the strange feeling that he was never here. Stop the clocks. Stop the clocks.

  I am constantly being told – sometimes by complete strangers – how remarkable has been my strength in the face of this tragedy, because apparently the ‘normal’ reaction, whatever that is, is to be racked with bitterness and anger. But what kind of a way is that to lead a life? We are so used to people feeling that they need to hold on to their anger and be unforgiving, but that just slowly eats away at you. Being forgiving doesn’t mean you accept what has been done to you, it just means you can let go of what has happened, because at the end of the day you cannot change it. The alternative, after all, is to be consumed with anger – and what purpose does that serve?

  I don’t know what the truth is, beyond finding a truth for yourself. Finding your own individual spiritual path. I’ve read quite a lot of Buddhist philosophy, and I think I have mixed some of that in with my Church of England and Catholic school upbringing to come up with my own unique blend of Rosie Batty life philosophy. And as for my spiritual beliefs – well, I believe in reincarnation. So if you opt out, you’ve only got to come back and repeat the life. You’ll have to deal with it eventually.

  We are all on a journey, and we all have things to learn. None of us knows what is around the corner, and it’s what you learn from the experiences that life deals you that defines that journey. In my case, that’s whether you gain wisdom and insight or whether you stay bitter and angry.

  People ask me all the time: ‘What do you think about Greg?’ And the truth is, I don’t think about him much at all. I don’t hate him. I just don’t waste any time or energy thinking about him. I did have one conversation recently with his brother – he called me without realising it. It was one of those things where he had hit a wrong number in his phone, and I called him back without knowing who it was. We ended up speaking for a while, and I said how bad I felt for him and his mum and dad, because Greg’s family has been inadvertently caught up in all of this t
oo. It’s not their fault. They live in a small country town and they carry the stigma every day. I think they were selective about what they chose to be aware of with Greg and his behaviour, but Greg was their son and brother. No matter his crime, he was once a baby that his mother cradled. I know it cannot be easy for them.

  One of the things I am proud of is being respectful towards Greg. There is nothing to be gained by defiling his memory. If I think anything at all about him, it’s that he and I were both failed by the system. That whatever intervention occurred – from a law enforcement and mental health perspective – it was ultimately too little, too late. And so finally, I have come to accept there was nothing more I could have done to prevent Luke’s death.

  I had been through the courts, I had taken out the IVOs. I had exhausted all legal options and even considered running away to England. I tried to manage Greg myself, and when that failed, I got the law involved and did everything the police and courts subsequently told me to do, naïvely trusting that the system would protect me. That it would protect Luke. But we were both simply victims by association of someone’s mental health problems. And there are a lot of people in that position today. They have a tormented journey with no respite – and that’s a national tragedy.

  That’s where the coronial inquest was good for me, as taxing as it was. It set out in black and white the sequence of events that led up to Luke’s death, and analysed the journey I had been on in the previous eleven years with Greg, and helped me come to understand that there was nothing more I could have done.

  I have learned a lot since Luke was killed. I can see more clearly the trap I was in. Do I have regrets? Yes. Would I have done things differently a second time? Absolutely. Would things have turned out differently if I had? Maybe, maybe not.

  You cling to the things that make living each day bearable. And for me, one of those things is the fact that Luke’s murder was a premeditated act. It was Luke’s last night of cricket training for the season. Greg didn’t know when he would be seeing Luke again. He had emptied his bank accounts, packed up all his belongings at the share house. When he set out that afternoon for Tyabb oval, he had no intention of ever coming back. If I hadn’t said yes to Luke spending five more minutes in the practice nets with his dad, I suspect it would have happened some other way, in some other place.