I’m Kirsten. And I’m not here as an expert, I’m here as a mother whose life was split into a before and after.

I know what it’s like to smile through meetings and fall apart in the carpark. To freeze in the supermarket because you saw her favourite snack. To replay the last conversation over and over, as if saying it differently might rewrite the ending. I know what it’s like to hold it together for everyone else, until you can’t.

When my 24-year-old daughter Kahlia died by suicide, everything broke; including me. There was no map, no how-to. Just shattered pieces and a blank page. So, I wrote, to her, about her, for her, and for me, because I didn’t know how else to breathe.

I live in Wellington with my partner Mark, my teenage son Zac, and Buster the dog, who always seems to know when the grief’s about to hit. I’ve worked as a beauty therapist, a banker, a teacher, a manager, a public servant; but nothing has asked more of me than this. Nothing has remade me more.

I hold a degree in Educational Psychology, but it’s the grief that taught me how to sit in discomfort, how to hold space, how to honour a person’s whole story; not just their ending.

I created this space for people like me, and people like you.
The ones who’ve lost someone or nearly have.
The ones who feel like grief is a language no one else speaks.
The ones who love someone with a hurting mind or a haunted past.
The ones trying to make it through the day with a heart that feels too full and too empty all at once.

This isn’t a polished offering from someone who’s “healed.”
This is my hand, held out in the dark.
Come as you are.
You don’t have to do this alone.