Blooms of grief

By Kelly Yates
A HAMPTON Park woman is living through every mother’s ultimate nightmare – the death of a child.
The feeling of her chest being ripped out with grief is something Alexandra Browne-Hill lives with every day.
Now she has published a book of notes she wrote to her dead son to help overcome her tragic loss.
Her 17-year-old son Kieran died during a camping trip with mates in Tonimbuk over the Easter long weekend three years ago.
The apprentice boilermaker was riding on the tray of a ute when the vehicle flipped as his friend was driving around a corner. Kieran was pinned under the ute for an hour and a half.
“I felt shocked, a deep shock, when I heard he had been involved in an accident,” Mrs Browne-Hill said.
“I couldn’t move. It was like a heavy weight was holding me down.”
It took Mrs Browne-Hill two hours to get to the hospital where she stayed with her son until he died four days later, six weeks short of his 18th birthday on 13 June.
Devastated and bewildered by her son’s sudden death, she began to write to Kieran in a diary given to her by a close friend.
It was these diary entries that then became the basis of her book The Flowering Gum.
“I was terrified that I’d forget things about him so I started jotting down events and each day I would write to him,” she said.
The self published book is a first for Mrs Browne-Hill.
“The only other things I’ve ever written are letters to my children’s teachers over the years about their behaviour at school,” she said.
Mrs Browne-Hill descri-bes The Flowering Gum as a handbook for all people who have experienced the death of a child.
“I went through all the emotions of shock, anger and denial after his death but I made the choice to get up and make him proud,” she said.
Mrs Browne-Hill, who has been a nurse for 30 years, felt that part of her had died when she lost her son.
“It is just out of order. As a parent you expect to go first, not your child,” she said.
“I will never be complete again but I want people to know they can go on after the death of a loved one.”
Mrs Browne-Hill and her family buried Kieran on 17 April and planted a flowering gum at the Berwick Cemetery to mark his 18th birthday.
“When people ask me about Kieran’s tree I tell them that if I can’t watch the boy grow up then I shall watch the tree grow instead,” Mrs Browne-Hill said.
For details about The Flowering Gum visit www.thefloweringgum.com.au.