Rebecca Healy with her winning certificate in Perth. Photo: The Grief Centre of Western Australia.
An Esperance woman has won the Empty Chair Creative Expression competition in Perth after her work that conveyed her journey with grief inspired the judges.
The competition enabled grief sufferers to express their feelings through creative mediums including painting, sculpting and writing.
Last Friday in Perth, just moments after the panel had announced the winner, an exhausted Rebecca Healy quietly entered the room and took a seat at the back.
She had just travelled the long journey from Esperance to the city by bus.
“I got there late so when I walked in they were like ‘oh, Rebecca you’ve won’,” Ms Healy said.
“It was a big shock – I wasn’t expecting it.
“I had to ask them for a reprint of the poem because I just wrote how I felt and sent it and I remembered it, but not exactly.”
Healy’s inspiration to enter the competition stemmed from a Grief Centre WA program in Esperance earlier this year, which supported people dealing with grief and suicide loss.
The workshop was about starting conversations and Healy said it was helpful because people often lived alone with their thoughts.
Healy’s poem “A Random Thursday” was her way of expressing her grief.
She said after losing someone, she learned to move on but the anguish still surfaced, particularly when she was overwhelmed.
“I lost my dad about five years ago so that was pretty significant for me and it affected everything for me from then going forward – I’d broken up with my husband and I have two kids and it was really hard to lose that support as well,” she said.
“He was that constant presence so I was always ringing him… if I needed him, I could go to him so it’s just that he wasn’t there anymore.
“I think a lot of people don’t realise how affected they are by grief… .”
Healy said she chose poetry because she had always been a writer and sometimes struggled to voice her words.
“There’s no formal process – that’s the best thing about poetry,” she said.
“Whatever you write can be poetry if that’s your intention, it doesn’t have to rhyme, it doesn’t have to be certain length, you can just write what you feel and it’s right.
“Sometimes it’s a lot more difficult to speak about how you are feeling but you can’t fail at art and you can’t fail at writing because it’s what you feel and you’ve just expressed it.”
Through personal experiences and her work in mental health and disability support, she said reaching out to support services could help people choose the right path after a bereavement.
“I work at Holyoake and Forrest Personnel so I was really interested in the link between how people who are dealing with grief sometimes turn to addiction,” she said.
“If you don’t feel you have enough family or community support, you find ways to cope the way you can.
“I think creative expression is a really good way to sit with your emotions, however they are.”
The competition winners were announced on May 30.
Another Esperance local, Laura Plunkett, won fourth prize for her sculpture “Go’n Up”.
