In episode 14, I talk about the astonishing Australian author, Jessie Cole. I’ve just finished reading her second book – a memoir called Desire: A Reckoning, which came out in August this year. Her publisher, Text Publishing, describes it as an unabashed, thrilling exploration of the very nature of desire, as well as a story about vulnerability and strength, loss and regeneration.

I’ve been raving about it to a few friends who are keen to read it. However, as soon as I told them about it, I realised it would be a good idea for them to read her debut memoir, Staying, first. Not just because it precedes, chronologically, the events in Desire. But because I want to honour the author’s journey by giving my friends the opportunity to really understand the trauma she was carrying when the story that’s central to Desire takes place. And, while she touches on her family tragedies in Desire, it’s really the events that unfold in Staying that help the reader understand this trauma, in an unforgettable, visceral way.

Jessie Cole grew up in an isolated valley in northern New South Wales – not far from where I lived for 12 years. Her early childhood was full of creek swimming and barefoot free-range adventuring. That is, until her older half-sister takes her own life when Jessie is on the cusp of adolescence and then her father, wracked by pathological grief and mental illness, does the same thing, several years later.

Staying is the story of an adolescence “bookended” by the suicides of her half-sister and father, and the aftermath of these two appalling losses.

It took Jessie, who was already a published author – with two successful novels under her belt – about 10 years to write Staying, and it is, as a result, imbued with the introspective, depth of thought and compassion that you’d expect from a decade of processing and writing, reflection, and re-writing.

The result is a gentle, nuanced, compassionate tale. While it’s incredibly sad – and made me cry more than once – Staying somehow transcends despair.

As Tim Winton wrote in his front cover blurb for Staying, it’s "a wounded, lovely, luminous book about grief, trauma and the strange healing potential of words."

Staying: a memoir was longlisted for the 2019 Colin Roderick Award and shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

Now you may be wondering about my choice of text for this episode - being about suicide – when today’s guest is going to be talking about assisted dying. But I see it as an opportunity to dissect the language we have used, in the past, about both.

My teacher and friend, Zenith Virago – who founded the Natural Death Care Centre in Australia and has conducted numerous Deathwalker trainings across the globe – makes a deliberate point of not using the word suicide because it’s archaic and inappropriate now that the act is no longer against the law. Instead she says the person killed themselves or, at the very least, took their own life.

Like many other deathwalkers, I am an advocate of individual agency – that is, I believe in the right for an individual to decide for themselves when and how they wish to die.

That is NOT to say that I don’t acknowledge the huge amount of suffering that loved ones might feel when someone takes their own life. Or that I don’t discount what we need to do as a society to genuinely support those who are struggling with the job of living, whether it be because they have a mental illness, an addiction or are socioeconomically destitute. We can and must do more to ensure people who are struggling get help.

But I believe years of not talking about "suicide" has been part of the problem. For most of the 20^th century and at least a decade into this one, it was the mainstream media’s official policy not to publish any details of a death caused by one’s own hand, because the experts feared that media coverage led to ‘copycat’ killings. As a result, up until about 2009, when there was a major Australian Senate inquiry, a cloak of silence remained the official federal and state government policy in Australia.

For me, it seems typical of the mainstream Australian culture in which I was brought up, and here in New Zealand pakeha culture too, where we didn’t learn how to express our emotions, where there was a stigma attached to those with a mental illness, where we didn’t talk about death generally and definitely not suicide. Instead, those of us who were a little unstable or vulnerable were just left alone to implode.

Finally, in 2011, the Australian Press Council introduced new reporting standards on suicide, leading to more open media coverage. The support groups on the frontline of mental health work supported this monumental shift, publicly agreeing that the stigma associated with suicide was a “negative force.”

For the same reason, most people who are in favour of end of life choice, also strongly oppose the use of "assisted suicide" and "suicide" when referring to physician-assisted euthanasia, and prefer phrases like "medical aid in dying" or "assisted dying".