Moving Forward

On Noah's birthday I received an email from a reporter at the Examiner newspaper. She said she had just heard of our story and believed that it would've been Noah's 18th birthday. She was the health reporter at the Examiner, and wondered if I was interested in doing a follow up story, since our family had been in the paper a lot over the years.  She said she wanted to focus on the side of grief and mental health. 

I'm always happy to talk about mental health and grief, especially if what I share helps someone else, so we organised a time to meet up to do the interview. We met later that week and a photographer came to our house and took some photos of us all together. 

In the paper that Friday was an editorial which I didn't expect, which mentioned our family.  As much as you wish things haven't happened to us, it's comforting to know that our experiences have helped other people, either by helping to know that they aren't alone with how they are feeling, or because it helps them to appreciate what they have.  

The reporter let me know that our story would be in the paper the following Sunday, but I had no clue it was going to be on the front page! I walked through Coles to buy the paper and was so overwhelmed to see the front page.  I quickly grabbed two copies (one for Mum as she's in the USA) and quickly got out of there. 

 I'm always so anxious to see how the story turns out, as you never really know what spin they will put on things, or if they'll take certain quotes and not others.  The reporter Jessica did a lovely job on it. 

 This is the text from the story by Jessica Willard. You can also read it online here. 

"King, families are forever." The words sit above a mantelpiece in a Newstead living room. It's in a house filled with photographs that help tell the story of a family of six, now four, who strive to make every day count.

Lisa King and her sons Jalen, Harri and Kobe are still managing their grief. On October 8, 2011 they said goodbye to son and brother Noah. Then, just three-and-a-half months later, Lisa's husband and the boys' father, Aaron, suffered a massive heart attack.

Suddenly, Lisa was not just grieving the death of her child, but also the love of her life. She was now a widow and a single mother struggling to navigate her sons through their own grief.

At the time one of the only things she could take comfort in was a blog she had started as a way of sharing Noah's story. The Kings was a place where Lisa could share the highs and the lows of being a stay-at-home mum caring for four boys, as well as the full-time carer of a son living with complex disabilities.

It also became a form of therapy as she came to terms with her own grief and mental illness. To date The Kings has been viewed by more than five million people.

"Blogging wasn't big when I first started it," she explained. "My cousins were actually one of the first people I ever knew to have one, and I didn't even know what a blog was.

"I thought no one would be interested in reading about my life, it would just be something for my friends and family. We also knew Noah wasn't going to be with us forever and I thought it would be a nice way to start capturing family memories."

Lisa also wanted to share Noah's story to let people know about the challenges of having a child with a disability. However, she also wanted to portray the positives.

Despite being "the perfect baby", three days after he was born Noah started screaming. It wasn't until nine weeks later that the screaming stopped when tests revealed Noah had hydranencephaly, caused by a stroke in utero resulting in fluid in his brain.

Lisa and Aaron were told Noah would never walk or talk. He would never be able to go to the toilet on his own and would probably be deaf, blind and unresponsive to them. They were also told he might only live for a few years.

After 10 years and three months, Noah's body began to shut down. Describing his life as a gift, Lisa said they had been told many times the reason Noah lived for so long with his condition, was because of the love and care from his family.

In the weeks after Noah passed away, Lisa described the hole left in her family as well as the immense sense of gratitude for the time they got to have with him. Life was starting to move and the family were starting to turn a corner with their grief. Then, the unimaginable happened.

While on a family holiday at St Helens, Aaron suffered a heart attack. Lisa detailed the moments leading up to his death in her blog. After enjoying a morning of fishing, he sat down to eat before having what looked like a seizure. Moments later he was blue and not breathing. Paramedics were unable to revive him and 45 minutes later, he was pronounced dead.

An autopsy revealed Aaron died from a cardiac arrhythmia. As a baby he had undergone surgery to treat a hole in heart which had resulted in scarring.

"For him to live 39 years with no symptoms that his heart still wasn't right is amazing, and I have no doubt that the stress of losing Noah put strain on his already broken heart," Lisa wrote in her blog.

Life was never the same for the Kings. For Lisa, knowing she had three boys to care for was what got her out of bed every day. However, about 18 months after Aaron's death she realised she wasn't doing as well as she thought.

"I took one of the boys to a psychologist we had been seeing and he told me I didn't look so good. He asked me to do a mental health check with him," she said.

"When he looked at all the things I had marked he told me he thought I had severe depression. I just thought everything had caught up with me and that was it."

After being advised to talk to her GP, Lisa was diagnosed with depression. However, despite knowing it was an illness, she said she still felt like she had failed herself.

"I just thought - 'this is what grief really feels like'. Because I had to just function. I had to get out of bed, I had to go to work, I had to get the boys to school. I imagined grief was lying in bed, screaming and sobbing. But it wasn't like that."

Despite being hesitant to take medication for her depression, Lisa said it ended up being the best thing she had ever done.

"It took a good month, but then I started to feel normal again. I could get out of bed and feel OK," she said.

"I had done all the things I thought I could to help. I was going to the gym, exercising, eating well and getting good sleep. I just felt I had let myself down. But mental illness is an like any other, it's just you have to treat your brain. You would go the doctor if you had a chest infection. Mental illness should be treated like any other illness."

Today, Lisa said the family were still moving forward with their grief. On June 26 - what would have been Noah's 18^th birthday - the family visited his grave. It is something they do often for both Noah and Aaron, in an effort to remember all their happy times together.

"Every day we live our lives imaging they are watching us. We just try to make them proud of what we are doing," Lisa said.

"Jalen is at university now in Hobart doing a bachelor of media. I think that's been his dream for a while and I think Aaron probably wouldn't believe that he has a son at uni.

"Harri is really passionate about sport. Jalen loves his movies. Kobe has his sense of humour. All the boys are so much like their dad in different ways and they just remind me so much of him."

For the past four years Lisa has been finding another sense of fulfillment teaching at Mowbray Heights Primary School. But despite loving her job, she said one of the hardest things remained other people's perceptions of her grief.

"The message I think is important to share is that there is no timeline for grief," she said.

"It is not as raw now, but it is still there every day. Just because someone is looking happy and is seeming like everything is fine, it's not always fine in the background.

"It's also important for people not to be scared to talk to someone who is grieving. A lot of people tell me they don't know what to say, so they don't say anything. They might be scared they will upset you if you. But you are sad anyway and for me, I just appreciate someone mentioning their names."