Michelle talks grief, widowhood and Census recognition with ABC Canberra

This is Afternoons on ABC Radio Canberra. Many grieving people spend months or years trying to carry their grief alone. Some might feel they should be coping differently. Others might feel an expectation to hide their grief because the people around them no longer fully understand their ongoing reality of grief. Michelle Moriarty is a trained social worker who became a young widow more than 20 years ago, and those experiences propelled her to create an accessible support network for others called Grief Connect, including education and training and group peer support, some offered free, particularly for those living in rural, regional and remote Australia, and particularly widowed Australians. Michelle has been in Canberra hosting a free widowed grief peer support gathering as well as graduating from the Australian Rural Leadership Program.

Host: So welcome to Canberra, Michelle.

Michelle: Oh, hello. Good morning.

Host: Congratulations on graduating. How has that incredible leadership program shaped your thinking and actions?

Michelle: It’s been a huge journey. It’s been a four session program over 15 months. I’ve been alongside 26 leaders from across Australia. We were brought together on scholarships and the connections and the genuine friendships that have formed out of the program have been life changing for me, and also brought a lot of value to being able to move forward as the founder of Grief Connect and bring more services and support out to our rural, regional and remote areas.

Host: What difference do you feel that leadership program has made to your thinking about Grief Connect and where you want to make impact now?

Michelle: It really has brought a lot of thought to my own personal leadership skills and confidence, because being out in the rural areas, we don’t often have a lot of access to programs such as the Australian Rural Leadership Program. So having the support and the learning, we immersed ourselves in a lot of physical challenges. For example, our first session was camping off-grid, no mobile phone, backpacking around the place, up steep gradients around Kangaroo Valley. So we had a lot of very hard physical challenges as well as emotional and social challenges, because as you can imagine, 27 leaders with all very strong minds, with absolute expertise in their own field – you throw us all together and there are going to be differences of opinion and challenges in thinking. Those really hard, uncomfortable conversations then became quite courageous conversations, because suddenly we’re having to work through some very big challenges, and that can then be applied to our own personal leadership in the area that we’re working in the sectors out in the regions.

Host: Yeah, they call them fierce conversations, don’t they? And no doubt part of that is sharing your own story, and your own story about founding and being the director of Grief Connect. So what can you share with me about that change to your life and your children’s life decades ago now?

Michelle: Sure. So I’m a social worker of 20 years, so I was minding my own business. I was partnered with my late partner, now Nathan. We had a two-year-old, we were living life and had so many hopes and dreams for our future. We were camping and he was working FIFO, fly-in fly-out, in West Australia, and on the 10th of June 2018, Nathan died suddenly. And every single aspect of my life and my children’s life and family, friends – such a ripple effect. Every aspect of my life changed. So it wasn’t just, oh, one aspect and at the end of the day I can go home and everything’s going to be okay. It was literally living a nightmare. And so it was certainly something that I wasn’t prepared for, even being a social worker and having supported many people who have experienced grief and bereavement. Actually experiencing such deep grief was a whole experience of its own. It’s hard to find the words to even explain how deep and how devastating that can be, with the sense of hopelessness. Hopelessness just overtakes, and you suddenly have to figure out how you’re going to put food on the table, keep the roof over our heads. How am I going to just do some basic things, let alone keep up with all of the things that we were doing in our active life?

Host: Michelle, as a qualified social worker, did you also feel perhaps a sense of extra pressure to just get through it, to just recover from it more quickly perhaps because of that prior training?

Michelle: It was more that my skill set – I mean, certainly that has helped me develop Grief Connect. But for me, no matter how skilled you are, when your person, your partner, dies, there is a very raw, innate response. And that grief response is something that you can’t be prepared for, there is nothing that prepares you for that. Certainly for me, I knew about various services, I knew what generally needed to happen, but there are a lot of things that I was totally unprepared for in terms of processes and tasks that needed to happen. And also that overwhelming sense of hopelessness – how do you get through that? How do you say to yourself, everything’s going to be all right, when you haven’t even got the person, your partner, there for you to say and have a debrief and go, this is really rubbish and really hard, what do I do next? That person’s not there for us as widowed people. So it’s a whole world of having to navigate a way forward, and that’s why I founded Grief Connect.

Host: At what point did you realise peer support was really at the heart of helping others learn to live with grief, hour by hour, day by day?

Michelle: It was around four months after Nathan died. As a young widow at 38, I didn’t know any other young widowed people, and I didn’t really know any older widowed people either, to say, hey, what am I supposed to do? How do you get through this? So through a friend of a friend, I’d been connected with another young widow. She’d invited me around to her home and we talked, she gave me a few hours of her time, which I’m still very greatly appreciative of, because it gave me that sense of hope, because I had a living role model in front of me who has not only survived the death of her person, but also was striving in terms of functioning, and I could see – if she can continue life and she can keep going, then maybe so can I.

You’re listening to Triple Six ABC Radio Canberra. My guest is Michelle Moriarty. She is the founder and director of Grief Connect. She’s just graduated from the Australian Rural Leadership Program here in Canberra.

Host: Michelle, what impact is Grief Connect now making?

Michelle: Grief Connect provides services and resources to any grieving Australian to be able to connect with each other through peer support communities that are online. So you can be living on farm, you can be living in the middle of nowhere, or you can be living in metro areas, and you can connect in and be surrounded by a whole range of people who actually get it, who understand that grief experience, and who – we share stories, we share experiences and we learn from each other, and it’s also just that power in that, oh, me too, that’s happened to me, I get that, and it really sucks.

Host: And what propelled you to offer free support as well through this program?

Michelle: Well, it initially started after I had met the widowed person I’d spoken about earlier, and after that point I’d started a Facebook group. Initially there was four of us within the group, the Grief Connect Young Widowed Support Group, and that group slowly grew to 30 members, and I thought, wow, I can’t believe there are 30 of us. Little did I know that there are over 1 million of us living across Australia, widowed people that is. Unfortunately, my dad, Neville Moriarty – I’m an only child, so it was a very close dad and I – my dad died four years after Nathan. Dad had been a huge part of me being able to find my way forward after Nathan’s death, so his loss was another great loss for me to navigate. So after dad died, I’d also founded the Over 55 Widowed Support Group, because of course my mum is now a widow, and within those communities there is online peer support and we also meet up anywhere across Australia. Any member is able to create a coffee event or a lunch event or a children’s park event – it’s up to any member to say, I’m in this spot, I’m in this area, does anyone want to meet up? And that’s where there’s a lot of power and support through meeting up face to face and being able to have those real, genuine conversations where there’s no judgment, there’s no opinions, and we can talk freely around some of the really harsh realities in grief – and we also have a laugh.

Host: It’s important, isn’t it, Michelle? And you are here in Canberra offering a free widow peer support group over the weekend. How did it go? All the sort of conversations?

Michelle: It went really well. I always walk away from meeting other widowed people just absolutely inspired with their strengths. The conversation topics – gosh, we had such a range, going from sharing information around support services and around some of those practical services that we need when we need to start undertaking death and estate matters. And then we also talk about how we get through the night time – quite often the night is the loneliest part. We also talk about other people’s response to us as grieving people. Quite often we can find people who have really good intentions, but because grief is a really awkward subject to talk about still – and that’s what we’re trying to change with Grief Connect. So it’s around those conversations, oh look, this person has said this to me, and we all pitch in and support each other to go, actually that’s a really hard situation, that sucks to have to go through that, but here’s some strengths. We also, for example, can talk about repartnering – things that people will genuinely feel uncomfortable talking about outside of our group. But any conversation is on the table, and it’s all about supporting each other with an open heart and open mind.

Host: Yeah. So in your determination to improve recognition and visibility for people experiencing grief, and particularly widows in rural, regional and remote areas, how do we measure grief and widows at a national level? Is there a problem?

Michelle: There absolutely is a problem. So many widowed people in the groups have recently, including myself, undertaken the Census 2026 questionnaire. Within that questionnaire we all have to tick a box, and for myself, back in 2021, for that census, I was widowed – Nathan died, there was no bringing him back, of course, and we were also living together, so we were living as a de facto couple. But the issue for me was when that census questionnaire came around, I had to tick the single box. So my grief, and the grief of many de facto widowed people out there, which is a very high proportion of men and women within my Grief Connect widow support groups, our grief is not recognised, and we are not able to identify as a widowed member within the widowed community, because we are de facto and we don’t have that legal piece of paper to say married, therefore the status being widowed. The Census 2021 statistics were that there were 1,029,142 widowed people living across Australia. However, that does not accurately reflect widowed grief, because of the de facto widowed people out there who are not being included in that statistic.

Host: If you had to estimate, how many do you estimate or speculate there could be that aren’t being counted?

Michelle: Look, I would say another 1 to 1.5 million people on top of the million already. It’s significant, and it is a real issue, because it has ongoing issues, including on the base level for me, the service and the support that I provided in addition to normal, because what was happening was we get sent the questionnaire and many people are triggered – they’re already experiencing grief, their person died two weeks, two years, however long before, and suddenly they’re still having to tick a box that’s not reflecting them, their experience, and they’re already feeling isolated in their grief, let alone not being able to have it reflected by government and Australia as a whole. So it is a really important aspect of census that needs to be reviewed.

Host: You’re here in Canberra, you’ve been to Parliament, you’ve had an opportunity to broach and address senators and other leaders. Do you feel like your message is getting through, this call for a broadening of the category in the census?

Michelle: Not yet, and this is why we’re having this conversation – it’s a road to the next census, and also census is also working hard now with their reporting, but we need this change. The sooner that we’re consulted with, as grieving widowed people and de facto widowed people, the sooner that consultation process occurs and that changes to the next census reporting questionnaire occurs, the better.

Host: With better recognition and visibility of the number of widows and people grieving, how could that change things like research, funding, service planning, advocacy and support for the people that you’re trying to support at the moment?

Michelle: Look, funding is a huge challenge for Grief Connect and for other grieving support services out there. It’s certainly something that is the issue. Grief is not a mental health condition, so we sort of fall in this era that is not necessarily recognised, and we quite often fall through the gaps when we’re making grant applications. And of course, grant applications take a lot of time to write – for myself, I don’t get paid to write a grant application. So it is around going, right, we need support, we need funders, policymakers within government who can actually start addressing this and start making a concerted point of providing services such as Grief Connect with appropriate funding, so that we can support our widowed and grieving community to the needs that they actually need. Because at the moment, we’re all peddling hard underneath all of the services, providing grief support, struggling to get the appropriate funding.

Host: In an ideal world, with better recognition and funding, is there particular research that could assist widows and those grieving around the country?

Michelle: Absolutely. It’s certainly important that our widowed grief is provided with a range of research so that it can be reflected that we have specific support needs, because grief as a widow is certainly different from grief due to the bereavement of a child – equally as important, however different. And this is the importance: that we need to have widowed grief supported, as we do have suicide-specific grief support services. Grief, and widowed grief and de facto widowed grief, needs some specific research so that we can have our support services tailored to our needs.

Host: Michelle, you sound very determined. We wish you the very best of luck in your ongoing advocacy for other widows and other people living with and experiencing grief right around the country. Thank you so much for joining us on 666 ABC Radio Canberra.

Michelle: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on your show.

This is Afternoons on ABC Radio Canberra.