When First Nations father Ben speaks about losing his twin daughters soon after their birth, the room falls quiet.
His lips compress as he tries to keep his voice even.
“What makes the healing process harder is that three months, six months down the track, people move on a little bit. But you’re still picking up the pieces. You still have an empty bedroom,” he says.
His voice catches as he tries to continue.
“Things were really hard for me for a long time, and people didn’t acknowledge it.”
This is the kind of sentence that stays with you. Not because it is unusual. Because it isn’t.
As part of the Healing Through Community project, the SMS4DeadlyDads team spoke to many rural First Nations communities across Australia. Their stories aren’t the same, but they are all connected by a common thread. After the loss of a pregnancy or baby, support rightly surrounds mum. But in every community, we were told that there was simply ‘nothing for dad.’
One bereaved indigenous father put it simply: “It’s the one thing on your mind – but you can’t talk to anyone.”
The same grief stretched from one family to the next. A grief that many Indigenous men, especially those living in rural or remote communities, felt they must carry alone.
To develop supports for these First Nations dads, we started by having a yarn.
We met with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities from Thursday Island to Cairns, Port Augusta to Newcastle, and the places in between. And we listened for two years.
Fathers described the grief they had never spoken about before.
“The man is left out, and he is feeling it just as much as the woman is feeling it, you know… that loss.”
Elders explained how healing can come through connecting to culture and Country.
First Nations men didn’t need someone to tell them how to grieve.
They needed someone to acknowledge that they were grieving at all.
They needed permission to cry. Permission to ask for help.
They needed practical support that respected culture, honoured men’s business, and reached them privately, wherever they were.
These yarns with mob became 36 messages, each one shaped by the Indigenous voices that trusted us with their stories.
No message can take away the loss of a baby.
No message can take away a dad’s grief.
No message can fill an empty bedroom.
But it might remind a dad he isn’t alone. Someone sees his loss. Someone understands his grief.
Because behind every pregnancy or infant loss, there’s a dad grieving, too.
This article is edited by Associate Professor Richard Fletcher PhD, Principal Investigator, SMS4dads & SMS4DeadlyDads.
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