I am an author of life and death.

I am an author of life and death. Not in the fictional sense. Instead, I tell the very real stories of those that have lived, but have had their lives snatched away from them, cut cruelly short in the most brutal of ways. Sometimes, the stories I tell are of those that have barely had a chance at life. Those that were denied the chance to see the dawn of their adulthoods.

Horror and trauma, human suffering, and pain feature in all of the real stories I tell. ?I tell stories of banal brutality, often so unfathomable that we struggle to comprehend that the stories we write are one of fact, belonging to a real people. People who were not too dissimilar to you and to I, and the people we know and love.

The stories I write, begin after death. This means I never meet the person whose story I am tasked to weave. And yet, I feel so emotionally connected to them. Perhaps because of the intimate detail I am privy to as I gather the information needed to construct their stories and capture the realities of their lived experience. I see more personal and private information pertaining to the victim at the centre of the story than I may know about my closest family in friends. In fact, some of the information I learn is information that was never known, even by the people closest to them.

This conjures up a range of uncomfortable feelings for me. I sometimes feel an overwhelming sense of shame and guilt akin to what I would perhaps feel if I was caught reading a friend’s diary without their permission to do so. But given what I learn about victims, the strange sense that I somehow know them, is perhaps not as strange as it first appears.

I often wonder if the person whose story I am piecing together, like a complicated jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box for a guide, would like me. If I am a person, they would choose to tell their story. The person they would trust to be their last advocate. I hope so. Or at least by the time I have written their story in a form that is ready to tell, I hope they feel that I have given them a voice. A voice that has certainly been silenced by death but too frequently was also not heard in life.

And there are other parts to these stories that must be told. Chapters that are important to help us understand the full story I must tell. The stories of families, friends, communities impacted and changed forever by loss. Their stories must too be told loudly. They serve to remind us of the ripple effect of abuse and homicide and the baton of trauma that is passed across generations.

Helplessness overwhelms me as I listen to them tell their stories; stories that so frequently feature missed opportunities, and silence in response to cries for help.? In exchange trusting me with their story, they want answers. Accountability. Change. And whilst the story I write, in the guise of a statutory review, may provide some of those things, ultimately what families want is for the hands of time to reverse and their loved one to walk back through the door. ?

One such chapter includes the stories of those practitioners who so often were attracted to their professions by a strong desire to make a difference and protect the people they serve, only to find themselves in a position where they feel institutionally complicit in homicide and harm. ?I am yet to meet professional who has intended to add to the harm victims are exposed to. And as such, their weary tales of frustration and vicarious trauma are also worthy, to understand the complex systemic web they work within, and the chasms, gaps and injustice they try to bridge daily.

But in the gloom, there also the paragraphs of hope. The stories of positive practice and changemakers. Those professionals that do not seek shelter from the stories I tell. Instead, they are avid readers, drinking the words in, determined to absorb the learning contained within the pages.

And then, perhaps there is the story of the storytellers. For we are weary too. Sometimes that weariness is rooted in the fact we feel we write the same chapters over and over and over and over again. Desperate for respite that will only come from real systemic, societal change.

We are changed forever by the stories we keep and the stories we tell. Each face of each person’s story I have told is etched in my memory forever. They sit as shadows in the corner of my mind. And I hope they never leave me. ?As it is them, their memory, their legacy that reminds me that there are other stories, so many like theirs that still remain to be told. Their pain, which I carry as a little ache in my heart, reminds me of how privileged I am to be the author of their stories and why, in order to have less stories to write, we must dig deep and keep telling loudly them as long as they need to be told.

I am an author of life and death.

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