Once We Repaired Things - Part 12 - A Place I Felt Safe

With Father’s Day today, I’ve been thinking about fathers.

My father. Grief. Loss. And the strange ways in which, when you’re carrying more pain than you know what to do with, you search for some point of human connection.

By this stage, I was trying to find whatever pathway I could to reach Paul through empathy, reasoning and understanding.

I was carrying too much. 

I was carrying everything that was happening to me professionally and institutionally, the fear about my future, the financial consequences, the years of trying to make people listen, and the extraordinary burden of having to advocate for myself when I had no one standing beside me.

But there was another pain alongside all of that.

There was the fear that I was going to be left alone for the rest of my life with something deeply unresolved. That there would be no compassion, no understanding, no acknowledgement of what had actually happened or what I had been trying to say. No remorse for the hurt that had been caused.

There are records for what happened to me institutionally. There are laws. There are obligations. There are dates, emails, documents and evidence. However exhausting that fight has been, I can point to something tangible and say: This happened.

Human relationships are different.

There’s no regulator for a suffering heart. There’s no statutory process that can compel another human being to listen to you, understand you or show you compassion.

And, for me, that made this part of what I was living through extraordinarily difficult.

When somebody won’t hear you, you start searching for another way to be understood. You reason. You explain. You appeal to empathy. You search for something you have in common. You keep looking for the pathway that might finally allow the other person to understand what you’re trying to say.

We had both lost our fathers.

Perhaps somewhere in my grief and hopelessness I thought that shared experience might provide a bridge. Perhaps it might allow us to understand one another as human beings.

I was trying to find some way through something that was crushing me.

And strangely, unexpectedly, one of those attempts led me somewhere else.

It led me to a parish.

I don’t want to identify the parish, because this isn’t a story about denominations, institutions or historical divisions within Christianity. Nor do I want something deeply personal to me reduced to gossip, or (heaven forbid) scandal, when there’s no scandal to be had.

This is about faith.

My faith is separate from the hypocrisy I have witnessed in institutions that profess Christian values while behaving in ways that, in my experience, have been completely contrary to them.

I can’t pretend otherwise simply because an institution calls itself Catholic or Greek Orthodox.

I can’t go somewhere and feel that, by remaining silent about conduct I believe is wrong, I’m betraying my own conscience.

And I can’t worship somewhere I’ve been made to feel unsafe.

A church shouldn’t be another place of fear.

It should be a place of peace.

Of prayer.

Of mercy.

Of compassion.

Of healing.

Of non-judgement.

It’s the house of the Lord. We’re all supposed to be welcome there.

And in this parish, I felt safe.

The parish priest was a humble and wise man. There was something about his humility, his wisdom and the way he treated people that reminded me very much of my own father.

There was mutual respect.

There was no performance. No superiority. No judgement.

Just humanity.

He has since retired, but I will always remember what that meant to me during a period of my life when I was struggling to find anywhere that felt safe.

I also met lovely people there. Down-to-earth people. Humble people.

I had somewhere I could walk into and feel that I belonged.

And yet there’s an irony in that too.

Sometimes I would sit in that church surrounded by a community and still feel profoundly alone.

I would look around and think: Where is my family? Where is my husband? Where are my children?

I could belong to a community and still feel the enormous absence of the life I thought I might have had. 

I was sitting among people, but I was sitting alone.

God saw that.

God knew that.

A place where I felt safe, even when I still felt alone.

There were times throughout these years when I quite literally dropped to my knees in prayer because I didn’t know what else to do.

I felt cornered from every direction.

I had tried reasoning. I had tried explaining. I had tried regulators. I had tried institutions. I had tried asking people simply to listen.

There were moments when all I could think was:

Please help me. I don’t know what to do anymore.

Perhaps that’s why St. Jude has crossed my mind so many times — the patron saint traditionally associated with desperate situations and seemingly lost causes.

Because so many of the things I’ve been asking for were never unreasonable.

They only became seemingly hopeless because people repeatedly chose not to act.

Sometimes a “hopeless cause” isn’t inherently hopeless at all.

Sometimes it becomes hopeless because human beings make it so.

Because somebody will not listen.

Because somebody will not intervene.

Because somebody decides it is somebody else’s problem.

Because people who can make a difference choose indifference instead.

There’s something else about how I came to this particular parish that I’ll keep private. It involved something that seemed connected with Paul’s father that I happened to see in a past parish newsletter.

Perhaps God was leading me somewhere I needed to be.

Sometimes I’ve even wondered whether perhaps a father I never knew somehow helped lead me towards a place where I could find a little peace.

Perhaps it was a path from Our Father, not a father. 

I cannot know that.

But I do know where that pathway took me.

It took me into a church where I felt safe.

And perhaps, if Paul reads this, he can take something positive from that.

Something good came from something that otherwise is causing me enormous pain.

I found a parish community.

I found a priest whose humility reminded me of my father.

I found people who were kind to me.

And I found somewhere I could sit in the presence of God when I had nowhere else to put what I was carrying.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to attend Mass for some time.

I’ve become too unwell.

Years of regulatory failure, institutional harm, financial pressure, uncertainty, fighting, pleading and trying to make people understand, eventually take their toll. So does carrying unresolved personal pain alongside all of it.

I can’t carry all of this alone anymore.

I’ve been saying that for years.

There are finally signs that parts of what happened to me are being heard beyond the systems in which I spent years trying to obtain help. I’ve had meetings. I’ve had phone conversations. I’ve provided records. Matters have now reached the Commonwealth sphere.

I hope that means I’ll finally have people with the authority and agency to do what I could never do alone.

Because nobody should have to fight this hard simply to be heard.

And that brings me back to something much larger than my own story.

Indifference is one of the great diseases of our time.

I’ve experienced far too much of it.

The further my situation progressed, the more I encountered — and witnessed — what happens when human beings stop seeing the human being in front of them.

That matters far beyond my circumstances.

It matters when we talk about loneliness.

It matters when we talk about despair.

It matters when we talk about belonging.

And it matters enormously when we talk about suicide prevention.

Australia now has a National Suicide Prevention Office. Suicide prevention is increasingly being discussed as something requiring a whole-of-government and whole-of-society response.

That’s important.

But there’s something I need to say as somebody who has lived through years of pleading with systems and people for help:

What we say and what we do must align.

We cannot talk about suicide prevention while tolerating systems that leave human beings feeling powerless, unheard and abandoned.

We cannot talk about connection while practising indifference.

We cannot talk about compassion while looking away from suffering that’s inconvenient to confront.

And we cannot keep placing responsibility entirely on distressed individuals to somehow become more resilient to environments and systems that are contributing to their despair.

That’s where the next part of my story is going.

Because suicide prevention is very dear to my heart, especially after losing my beautiful dad.

This Father’s Day, though, I’m thinking about two fathers.

One I knew and loved enormously, and another I never knew.

And about a small, unexpected path that somehow led me, in one of the darkest periods of my life, through the doors of a church where I finally felt safe.

Maybe some things don’t need to be completely understood.

Sometimes we simply recognise the small amount of grace that emerged from something terribly painful.

And for that, I’m grateful.

I Wasn’t Allowed to Grieve - August 2021

“And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

1 Corinthians 13:13

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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

——

Update – Additional Context

After publishing this post, I was reminded of further details from those days that deserve to be recorded.

In the period surrounding our father’s death, a priest relative made remarks suggesting that our father had been “locked up in his own home” and that those closest to him could now “rejoice with what they had done.”

Those words were deeply distressing for our family.

What those comments failed to acknowledge was the long and painful history of interference, manipulation, and division that had surrounded our father for many years — circumstances that had already placed immense strain on him and on our immediate family long before the events of that week.

There was also another incident the morning after our father passed away.

A senior workplace figure — my manager — came to our family home.

Had the purpose of the visit been to offer condolences or support, it would have been received in that spirit. Our door was open in the aftermath of a devastating family tragedy.

Instead, questions were raised about when I would be returning to work, accompanied by comments that it was “a very busy time of year” and that staff could not be absent.

This occurred just hours after our father had died.

My mother had lost her husband. Our family was still in shock.

Rather than being given space to grieve, the conversation became focused on workplace availability and immediate expectations.

The exchange became increasingly distressing for those present and family members had to repeatedly insist that the visitor leave the house.

These moments remain difficult to recount, but they form part of the reality of what happened during that time.

Grief should be met with compassion, dignity, and understanding.

Instead, our family experienced intrusion and pressure at one of the most vulnerable moments of our lives.

Looking back now, that moment foreshadowed something I would come to understand much later — that even in the most human moments of grief, compassion can sometimes be displaced by institutional expectations.