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The Fires are Done But the Grief is Not
The Grief Journey of an Australian Wildlife Rehabilitator.
In this article I am interviewing my friend and colleague M. K. Skeel (Margaret Skeel) about her experience, what she has done to process her grief, and how she used creativity to begin healing her heart.
Wendy: The Australian Fires and Grief. Can you tell us what you personally experienced in 2019/2020?
Maggie: My farm burned in November 2019. In the morning, I first heard of the Liberation Trail fire, but it was more than eighty kilometers away. That sounded like a safe distance but I was wrong. By five in the afternoon, the dragon had arrived and my sons were fleeing for their lives across a burning bridge. Hours later, the family home was a smoldering ruin and the forest around it was black.
Wendy: How did this affect you personally?
Maggie: The Australian fires and grief…well..it’s hard to put into words the grief that developed then and over the next month, as the fires raged and spread, destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of bushland. Homes were lost, people died and countless plants and animals died with them. It was a tragedy so huge that the mind recoiled from it.
