A Person’s A Person, No Matter How Small

Posted: 3 March 2016

My wife Jane and I have two little girls, Clare and Louise; Clare turns two this month and Louise is just over six months old. Clare is at a really fun – but albeit all consuming – stage. She loves nothing more than playing outside, and if she is not insisting on being pushed around in her plastic toy car, she is carefully dropping her toys in the wading pool, before picking them out of the water and starting all over again. Louise is beginning to shuffle around on the lounge room floor while learning about the world through studying a range of stuffed animals. Clare will now regularly come and lay down next to Louise on the floor and with an enthusiastic ‘hello’ proceed to take back those stuffed animals which she believes are her own. Everyday our daughters are growing and developing but they really are still just babies. They rely on us for everything, we are their nurturers and their protectors, their friends and their family. Their world is safe and secure because we make it that way for them.

But what if one afternoon in the middle of Clare playing outside I just walked away, leaving her in the backyard by herself with no food, no protection and no shelter. Her smile would fall and the frown would descend into tears, she would cry her eyes out, her nose would run and she would go to the back door yelling ‘mummy’, ‘daddy’, not understanding what had just happened. As night began to fall she would cry and cry, tears streaming down her face. She would be hungry and want her milk. She is not old enough to reason out her situation and create or find shelter in the yard. I really don’t know, or do I want to know, how she would cope. Would she even make it through the night?

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Abortion, Depression and the Demise of Charlotte Dawson

Posted: 6 April 2014

Sadly, Australia recently lost a well-known television personality to suicide. Charlotte Dawson was only 47 years old when she was found dead in her waterside apartment. Being a media personality, the story was given much coverage with an outpouring of grief from people across the entertainment industry. At her memorial service one of her closest friends said farewell to “one of the most beautiful and generous, sharp and witty, sparkling and effervescent, honest and uncompromising people ever put on the planet.”

Unfortunately I learnt more about Charlotte Dawson through death rather than through life. Hers was a life that seemed so full of promise and possibility but in the end it was all too much for one person to bear. Charlotte left her home of New Zealand on the cusp of adulthood and spent ten years modelling in Europe and the USA before relocating to Australia. She worked in the fashion scene and eventually moved over to television making appearances on a range of shows including as a judge on Australia’s Next Top Model. It was the kind of life that fuels the sales of every gossip magazine around the world.

In 2012 Charlotte was admitted to hospital after trying to commit suicide. This incident stemmed from her being the target of a particularly sickening and very public hate campaign waged against her over Twitter. When she did actually succeed in taking her life this year, the mainstream media blamed her death completely on the depression resulting from the social media bullying. However, her battle with depression was nothing new and while the cyber bullying was the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ in 2012, Charlotte herself identified an incident 15 years earlier which she claimed was “my first experience with depression”. Read the rest of this entry »

Who is going to Hell?

Posted: 11 August 2013

Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. No matter who we are, where we live or what we do, we will get to experience three of these four options, with heaven or hell being the final destination. Interestingly, in any poll that is taken, belief in heaven always rates higher than belief in hell, but I wonder if most people have a slightly skewed understanding of both locations.

I was reading a small devotional book the other day and in the section on eternity it stated that those who have done their best in life will be “rewarded” with heaven, and those who have disregarded God’s laws would be “condemned” to hell. That is of course the most basic way to explain these destinations, the good go to heaven and the bad go to hell. I have no problem with belief in either place, the founder of Christianity spoke at great length about both so to disregard them is to really disregard the faith in general. However, I fear this simplistic way of describing eternity is sticking around far too long in the faiths of those who haven’t been to Sunday School for many years. It also makes belief in eternity seem even less believable to those who profess no faith. Read the rest of this entry »

Death. A Part of Life.

Posted: 6 October 2012

It turns out that I am dying. One day, in the not too distant future, I will be dead. It may be tomorrow or it may be in seventy years, but either way, compared with the scope of history, it will be fairly soon. It will happen to me and to you and to everyone we know. In fact from the moment we are born we are on a path towards death. Death is actually happening all around us. As you read this an old man is breathing his last breath in a nursing home and a middle-aged woman is saying goodbye to her family in a hospital. Over 150,000 deaths occur worldwide each day, yet the modern psyche seems less equipped to deal with death than ever before.

For all of history, illness, death and grief have generally taken place in the home within a family context. However, in the Western World in the last century, death and illness have been relocated behind reception desks and security staff into hospitals, nursing homes and palliative care units. People go in and bodies come out. Yet for most of us the closest we will get to that, is sitting in our car next to a windowless mortuary van at the traffic lights. Of course our progress in healthcare and nursing is a wonderful achievement but it has come at a price, that of us seeing death as a somewhat unique anomaly. This compartmentalisation of death in modern society into purpose built institutions away from ‘real life’ has resulted in a general ignorance and even fear of death. Read the rest of this entry »