In my previous post, “Dignity Requires Response: Psychosocial risk, institutional silence, and the emails that were never answered,” I wrote about the period in 2021 when I was sending email after email to a pastoral colleague asking simply for a human response.
Those emails did not appear out of nowhere.
They came from somewhere deeper.
They came from years of accumulated silence, stigma, and grief that had never been allowed to breathe.
To understand why those emails mattered so much, you have to understand what came before.
⸻
There are moments in a person’s life that divide everything into before and after.
For me, that moment was 2 February 2010.
Three days after I returned from Spain — from flamenco classes in Granada and Seville, from laughter and holiday festivals — my father took his own life.
Nothing prepares you for that report.
Nothing prepares you for the silence of an ambulance without a siren.
Nothing prepares you for the sentence:
“He has passed away.”
And nothing prepares you for what comes next.
⸻
The Night of Swords
Within an hour of my father’s death being confirmed, our home filled with people.
Not all of them came with compassion.
A priest relative arrived and, instead of offering comfort, delivered accusation. In Greek — so the police officers standing there thought he was ministering — he told us we had “locked my father up,” that we should “rejoice in what we had done.”
We had just lost our dad, my mum, her husband of 40 years.
We were in shock.
But somehow, even then, we were expected to defend ourselves.
The funeral arrangements were interfered with.
Decisions were made without our consent.
Gossip spread before we had even buried him.
And the stigma began.
⸻
“Forget Your Grief”
Three months later, a priest visited.
I thought he had come to offer condolences.
Instead, he told us to forget about my father.
To forget about our grief.
That our pain was “nothing compared to others.”
There is something deeply violent about telling a grieving family that their suffering is insignificant.
Listening costs nothing.
Compassion costs nothing.
Silence, sometimes, is holy.
But what I encountered was neither compassion nor silence.
It was dismissal.
⸻
The Facebook Post That Broke the Silence
Seven years later, in 2017, I finally broke my silence.
I shared a post challenging the stigma around suicide — challenging the language that frames it as a “crime,” the belief that those who die this way are simply exercising “free will,” and the notion that prayer and compassion somehow stop at death.
The response?
Defensiveness.
Accusations that I was “turning people away from the Church.”
Suggestions that I was angry at Christ.
I wasn’t angry at Christ.
I was angry at cruelty masquerading as piety.
At apathy disguised as doctrine.
At people who could debate theology but would not sit with a grieving daughter.
One priest eventually responded with compassion. His words were simple, humane, grounded. They reminded me that faith, when lived authentically, looks like love.
But the damage of stigma and insensitivity had already carved deep wounds.
⸻
Heritage, Identity, and Loss
I come from a long line of strong, resilient people.
My ancestors in the Peloponnese fought for freedom in the Greek War of Independence. They preserved language, faith, culture through occupation and war. My grandparents carried dignity through poverty. My parents sacrificed everything to build a life in Australia.
My father was a kind and gentle soul.
Depression is not a moral failure.
It is not a sin.
It is not a lack of faith.
It is suffering.
And suffering requires compassion — not judgement.
Years later, on All Souls Day, I was denied Holy Communion by the campus chaplain. For a baptised and sacramentally aligned Orthodox Christian — someone seeking simply to take up her cross and follow Christ — compassionate pastoral discretion would have been possible.
Instead, I remained seated alone in the pew while others approached the altar.
In that moment, I felt what I had felt since my father’s death:
Like an outcast.
But here is what I know now:
Christ was rejected too.
And rejection by people does not equal rejection by God.
⸻
The Workplace Aftermath
Grief did not unfold gently.
The morning after my father died, my manager arrived at our home and interrogated my mother about when I could return to work.
“It’s a busy time,” she said. Semester was starting.
I was not allowed to simply grieve.
Over time, unmanaged trauma compounded. Workplace bullying, ostracism, psychosocial hazards — all words I would later learn in the language of work health and safety — were layered over grief.
When you lose a parent to suicide and later face silence, isolation, and intimidation at work, your nervous system does not get a break.
It lives in survival mode.
Years later, when I was writing those emails described in “Dignity Requires Response,” I was not just reacting to a university’s WHS violations.
I was carrying grief that had never been allowed to heal.
Because when I needed a support network, I was abandoned instead.
I now understand what trauma does to the body.
The blood pressure spikes.
The shaking.
The exhaustion.
The hypervigilance.
This is not weakness.
It is physiology.
⸻
The Cost of Silence
What hurt most was the abandonment.
Colleagues who once said “everyone needs you” fell silent (or were coerced) when I needed support.
Institutions that speak of dignity and mission deferred to a misaligned and unethical “process.”
Regulators passed responsibility elsewhere.
Priests debated doctrine while families like mine carried unbearable weight.
Ostracism is a form of bullying.
Silence can be violence.
And yet, I kept speaking, because silence nearly killed me once already.
⸻
What I Believe Now
I believe:
- Listening is an act of dignity.
- Depression is not a moral failure.
- Institutions must live the values they publish.
- Post-vention support after suicide is not optional — it is essential.
- Compassion is not theological weakness; it is strength.
I have met extraordinary people — friends who stayed, who listened, who stood beside me quietly. I have met police officers who remembered my story years later. I have encountered priests who embodied humility and love.
They are proof that goodness exists.
But goodness requires courage.
⸻
If You Are Reading This
If you have lost someone to suicide:
You are not alone in how you feel.
Your grief is not a competition.
Your loved one’s life mattered.
And no one has the authority to weaponise doctrine against your pain.
If you are part of a church, a workplace, an institution:
Ask yourself whether your response to suffering is defensive or compassionate.
When someone says, “I am hurting,” do you correct them — or do you listen?
⸻
My story is not about tearing down faith.
It is about calling it back to its heart.
Faith, hope, and love.
And the greatest of these is love.
