Sienna's Garden
Nothing prepares you for losing an 11-year-old child to a rare medical condition. Our daughter Sienna passed away suddenly from an Arterial Venous Malformation in her brain, and the days that followed were a blur of meal deliveries, family, flowers, cards, not being able to get out of bed, and an acute sense that this couldn't be reality. When your body and mind are in that kind of turmoil, it really is one of the cruellest times to be organising a funeral.
Sitting in a room choosing caskets, cremation, jewellery to hold their ashes….it all felt so unfamiliar, like it belonged to a different kind of loss, a different kind of life. With so many thoughts and such heavy emotion, it's hard to accept you're even having to select these things, let alone create something that honours your child in a way that feels true to who they were.
Having someone acknowledge that, matters enormously. Someone who can ask the right questions about your loved one: who they were, what they loved, who loved them. That guidance is invaluable.
Sienna passed away during Covid, and we were forced into an outdoor funeral with only 30 people. It was held at Willunga Church, under the most beautiful tree. Sienna loved nature. It wasn't something we would have had the capacity to choose, or even known was an option, in the state we were in….but it was perfectly her.
In the weeks after she passed, flowers arrived at our house daily. But they were also slowly wilting and dying, day by day, a quiet, constant reminder of death and grief, watching bunch after bunch fade in front of us. So we made a decision: there would be no flowers at Sienna's funeral. There would be plants.
We filled the space around her casket with pots of every size and kind. It became one of the most important choices we made for her service. Each guest took a plant home with them, it was something of Sienna's, a memory, an action to carry forward. Those plants needed watering. They needed care. And in the middle of all that sadness, that kind of movement forward mattered.
In the early days of grief, sometimes all you can manage is one thing that makes sense. Getting up. Eating something. Washing a dish. Watering a plant. As the weeks went on, those plants were given the very best of care, and they grew in ways ordinary house plants never do.
I've heard it said that grief is love with nowhere to go. When Sienna wasn't physically there to receive it, the plants became somewhere to pour that love and attention instead. Her friends and family would send me photos, months later, of those plants growing wild and strong in their own homes. It gave them a way to stay connected to us, to her….and it gave us a welcome opening to talk about Sienna, again and again.
I'm so glad we thought of the plants. But honestly, it was luck, a decision made in the fog of the worst days of our lives. Having someone beside you who can guide you through those choices, who knows how to ask the right questions, who understands how you might feel about this day months or years from now - that is why Banksia Memorials matters so much in how funerals can be done differently.
Written by Marie Sulda
Counsellor
If you're navigating those first few weeks and need someone who's been there, Marie welcomes you to reach out at marie@travelthemind.com
