It’s been 20 years since the backpacker hostel in Childers was set alight while the people within it slept. People including me. Twenty years since I went to bed expecting to wake up to pick avocados under the Queensland winter sun, and instead woke to the deafening cracks of flaming timber and shattering glass as the building beneath me burned.
Fifteen people died that night, and yet the man who lit the fire is due for parole this month. He is, apparently, a “model prisoner” – those words are so jarring against the backdrop of grief he unleashed.
But the devastation wasn’t solely due to arson. Fire alarms were disabled, windows were barred, and some exits were blocked – all legally, at the time. Fire safety legislation has been strengthened around the world since then, yet just three years ago, 72 people died in London as the Grenfell tower burned – a building for which safety had been raised as a concern for years.
Twenty years. A normal memory might have long since faded, but trauma can be different. I’m writing this because I see those thousand-yard stares in every newspaper I open filled with stories of trauma, and yet in the years afterwards there were times I felt devastatingly isolated. I want to reach out to those people and tell them – as alone as you might feel right now, there are many who understand.
In the years afterwards, I felt fear and sadness, rage and desperation, numbness and dissociation and, finally, six years later when the court case eventually ended, exhaustion.
It wasn’t constant struggle. After the turmoil of maybe the first full year, I experienced the strange ability we have to package a memory away and ignore it. I went to university, I adventured again, I laughed and loved. But I was often slightly detached – and sometimes the door would slam open, flooding me with nightmares and grief.
I kept these moments from those around me. I didn’t want them witnessed, or to go over the experience again. I didn’t have the energy to reassure someone else, if in telling them they struggled too. But I also judged myself – after so long, why could I not be happy when I had my life?
And now as I watch the trauma of the world unfurling, I wonder how many people are quietly holding their moments to themselves too.
When it triggered again after six years I contacted a trauma counsellor but I felt too tired to repeat my story. Instead, it is other survivors who walked the path alongside me, their own lingering trauma making me feel less alone, our shared history forming a lifetime bond of love and support. I battled through, and out.
The fire will always be a part of me. I will always grieve those who died. My heart rate still rockets at an unexpected noise, or the smell of toxic smoke.
I just found that, one day, I was able to let it wash over me without drowning anymore.
As Covid19 deaths rise – for everyone grieving not being with someone they loved when they died – I want you to know that they didn’t die feeling alone. As the smoke closed in and death pulled stronger than life, I felt held by what seemed like all the love which existed in the world.
And in the world, there is more love than you can ever imagine.
Though one man lit that fire while we slept, an entire town looked after us afterwards. They gave food, clothes and a vast depth of care that allowed us to slowly find our feet again.
It’s the same solidarity and generosity that was seen in the immediate community response to Grenfell.
And it’s there again in the abundance of compassion and practical support as we collectively face the immeasurable impacts of a global pandemic.
This life is just so short, and we never know which morning it is when we wake up for the very last time.
We, or anyone we love.
So after 20 years I would say: love fiercely. Love fiercely, give food, and listen. Because it is these things which soften our journeys across this life – both during good times, and through any traumas we may need to walk.
• Jessica Wiegand is a company director in the UK. She runs research and advises companies on their culture, employee experience, motivation and wellbeing
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