LIFE AFTER DEATH: Jen Hutchison turned to writing to deal with tragedy
When her son died, Jen Hutchison was obliterated by grief. Yet much soul searching later, she is a firsttime author with a plan to help other mature writers, as Susan Horsburgh discovers.
For the first month or two after Jen Hutchison lost her son in 2012, she was barely able to function, reduced to little more than a heartbeat. For the next year, she fell into what she calls an “emotional coma”, moving through life like an automaton. She couldn’t say her son’s name without crying; grief was always lurking, ready to pounce.
“You’re in the supermarket, crying into the Weeties, because you see the cereal brand you bought when they were kids,” recalls Jen. “The depth of loss is beyond anything I have ever imagined.”
Complicating it all was the guilt. Her son, Raif, who was 31 when he died, had become addicted to cocaine during his four-year stint as an index trader in Hong Kong, and had died from an accidental overdose after his return to Melbourne, when he seemed on the road to recovery. Jen was tortured by the possibility that she was somehow to blame. “I was trying to work backwards in my mind, right back to when he was born,” she says. “Did I do the wrong thing by him? Did I miss something?”
Amid the turmoil, Jen’s husband Graeme was “drinking himself to death”, she says, and their 16-year marriage was crumbling. A capable, can-do woman who had always been in control, Jen found herself wrestling with a shocking new reality. “My marriage is in tatters, I’ve lost my son
... I don’t know how to fix it,” she says. “It was a revelation for me: you cannot fix this. So I needed to become a different person.”
Jen was a keen walker, and after Raif’s death, she plied the quiet roads around her property in Victoria’s high country, walking herself to exhaustion in a quest for sleep. One night, she hatched a plan to trek the ancient pathways of Spain’s Camino de Santiago. “I can’t resolve these things, so what if I take them all on a long walk?” she says.
Jen set out from Pamplona on a sunny October morning in 2013, carrying nine packets of Raif’s ashes and
8kg of essentials on her back. Each day she walked for at least six hours,
occasionally stopping to scatter her son’s ashes, and every night she stayed in a medieval village. There, Jen would document the day’s thoughts and experiences in her journal, and those musings form the basis of her debut book, Motherling.
According to bestselling author Toni Jordan – who was Jen’s writing tutor – the memoir is “for anyone who has ever lost anyone who is dearer to them than breath ... You never see the extent of someone’s heart, and Jen’s laid that whole heart on the page for us.”
The “motherling” of the title is an old English word meaning “precious mother”, but Jen uses it to label any woman who has lost a child. “We have ‘foundling’, we have ‘widow’ – we should have a name,” Jen reasons, “because it’s such a consuming state of mind ... having the life that you’ve given ripped away from you without warning.”
Sitting in her tastefully decorated CBD apartment on a chilly Melbourne morning, Jen brings out the simple brown-paper journal she carried 800km across northern Spain. At the back she has written details of where Raif’s ashes are scattered, so that his younger brother and two step-siblings might be able to visit those places one day.
Jen’s month-long walk wasn’t a magic bullet but “at the end, I was a whole person again”, she explains. “I didn’t have any more solutions than I’d had at the beginning, but
I was psychologically healthy ... I learnt that whatever happens, I will be able to manage.”
Equipped with a new-found faith in herself, Jen returned to Melbourne and enrolled in a Master of Writing and Publishing degree at RMIT University. She had studied economics after school and moved into a successful corporate career, but in her 40s she’d made a vow to one day become “the writer I didn’t have the guts to be”.
Now, at 67, Jen has more than kept that promise. Her debut book is the first offering from Journeys to Words Publishing, the company she has started to help more mature writers share their hard-won wisdom.
Toni Jordan applauds Jen for giving older authors a platform. “Publishing dictates the things we think about and talk about and the stories we tell ourselves as a country, but it’s also a commercial operation and there is a cult of the new and the fresh,” says Toni. “That’s important, but it does mean that equally important stories at the other end of life get neglected. Jen’s idea of capturing those stories is terribly exciting.”
At a time when most people are slowing down, Jen is savouring her “un-retirement”, writing and publishing books she is passionate about. “I’ve never had so much fun in my life,” she says.
On the family front, Graeme has given up alcohol and, after intense therapy and 18 months apart, their marriage is back on solid ground. Jen also has a newborn grandson.
“Just because you’re a certain age doesn’t mean you can’t start things, learn a new language, go travelling, create new friendships,” Jen says. “There’s no stopping anybody.”
Grief may be incurable, but Jen has found a way to accommodate loss and live a meaningful life around it. “There is a quiet, peaceful place that everybody can find, and that gives you strength and courage,” she says. “To honour my son and to make his life worthwhile, I’m conscious that I’m living every minute of mine.” AWW
“I learnt that ... I will be able to manage.”