How I Coped After Losing My Child
British backpacker Mia Ayliffe-Chung, 21, was murdered at a Queensland hostel in 2016. Her mother, Rosie Ayliffe, is the author of Far From Home, an account of Mia’s life, death and what happened after.
When I first heard about Mia’s death, I felt nothing. Two policemen sat down in my living room and told me, but I went into a state of disbelief. I think that was a coping strategy on my part, I was disassociated from my emotions.
Everybody goes through it in a different way. [Responses to death] are as different as people are different. My mother-in-law lost a son – my husband’s brother – and she just collapsed completely. Her legs went out from under her. She passed out on receiving the news, and that was so far from my experience.
The experience of grief for me combined an intense sense of loss with a realisation that everything I’d imagined my future held was no longer viable. If I was to carry on, I would have to start again from scratch and reinvent myself. I was no stranger to grief as I’d lost my father, but this was different because Mia died before her time, she hadn’t had a full and happy life or achieved her dreams and ambitions as Dad had.
You don’t get over it, you assimilate it … it becomes a part of who you are, for better or for worse. In dark moments, you contemplate the worst – you think of drugs and alcohol and suicide. But for me, that was fleeting.
Just being there and listening will be huge for most people. People kept saying, “I don’t know what to say to you.” There’s nothing you can say to me. Don’t worry. I just want to talk and for you to be there. It’s also never too late to tell someone a memory [about the person] they’ve lost. I still get those kinds of letters now, and every single one is treasure for me – knowing how many lives my daughter touched, and how precious she was to other people.
If Mia had died in another way, I wonder if the support would have been the same? However a child is taken – a suicide or a drug overdose, for example –you have to rally around a grieving mother.
I did see a specialist in grief therapy, and she was very good but what she didn’t recognise was that I was suffering from post-traumatic shock after the loss of Mia. She said, “no, it’s just grief.” I needed help for the post-traumatic stress because the physical effects on my body were so profound. My physical body reacted and I nearly collapsed.
When you lose a child [you need] to take things slowly. Give yourself time, if you can. Don’t go back to work straight away – you’d be burying things. Friends and community help. Having someone to talk to. Just sitting and talking about your child or whoever it is that you’ve lost. Recounting the memories, knowing people are thinking about you and your loss – all of that helps. When I came home [to England] from Australia, there was a meal on the doorstep and a bottle of wine [from my neighbours]. The feeling that someone had thought of you in that practical way was incredible. Another friend who’s an artist appeared on my doorstep after Mia died with a portrait of Mia.
People say silly things from time to time. One person said, “When are you going to stop being Mia’s mum?” But I still love that person; it wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t get into the mind of someone who’s lost a kid. I can’t judge people. “At least you’ve still got a beautiful dog,” someone else said! I was with someone at the time; we laughed and laughed.
Doing something meditative helps. I make pizza dough but there are better things to do, things you do where you can’t think of anything else, like rock climbing. If you think of anything else while you’re rock climbing, you’ll die. I tried pottery – it takes up your time and energy and you’ve got something practical at the end of it.
After Mia died, I felt her presence quite a lot. That feeling started to wane as time went by, and then a friend said she had been on a shamanistic journey and had met Mia. Mia said to her, “I haven’t been able to leave my mum until now, but now she’s ready and I can go.” When my friend told me that, I went into a real depression. I felt really low because I thought, “I’m not ready for you to go.” But once I came to terms with the fact that I think Mia is somewhere – I just don’t know where – it was incredibly comforting.
What I also found therapeutic was writing, expressing myself on paper, and also through my campaign against the conditions of the Working Holiday Visa [Mia was murdered while trying to fulfil the requirements of working 88 days on a farm]. It helped me deal with my grief and I’m so much stronger [than I was].
The sense of a life curtailed is devastating unless you find a way to deal with it. My way was to memorialise Mia, and to make her death mean something through campaigning. I hope the Australian government will pause for a moment in its pursuit of profit at the expense of young and vulnerable people, and consider how the 88 days [requirement] creates a vulnerability which [can] lead to exploitation.
Initially, I didn’t want to write a book. I tried to fictionalise the backpacker experience, then I decided to do this as an autobiography. But it tore my heart out. I still can’t read it now; they asked me to read it before publication, and I started but I just couldn’t do it. It was re-traumatising me.
Writing [the book] brought up a lot of memories. The bits about Mia and when she was a baby – revisiting that was hard. It was one hell of a therapeutic journey. But you need to revisit the painful stuff and that’s how the book changed my life.
Far From Home by Rosie Ayliffe, published by Viking Books, $34.99.