Is Reef Grief a thing?

A guest blog entry from podcast maker Samantha Hodder

Last March, when the full weight of what was happening in the world started to become clear to me, all the changes that we were about to face, all the obstacles we were about to endure, once it was actually announced, it took me down.

One afternoon in February I went to six different pharmacies looking for hand sanitizer, only to come home empty handed, so it's unfair to say that I was caught off guard. I was actually on my guard, waiting to figure out what this once-in-a-lifetime event was actually going to look like. Maybe a little too attentive.

Nothing seemed clear to me, and all necessities felt vulnerable. Should we keep our gas tanks full? I crammed my freezer full, bought extra toothpaste on hand, and bought twin packs of everything. I also bought a case of sweet-and-condensed milk, every bean I could get my hands on, and the biggest box of oats I could find. I even started freezing milk.

These are all still in my basement storage. Swing by if you need something.

But as I was stocking up for the apparent-end-of-time, what I found quite stunning was just how much other stuff flooded back into my jittery, achy nerves. Stuff that didn't really have a place in that moment of solving immediate needs.

A good friend who works as a therapist saw the signs, and she dropped off a book in my mailbox.
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The title says it all:

​Sitting down to read it last spring, I began to realize, that it was all, ALL, coming up, at the same point. A pity party. Misery loves company. Piling on. Call it what you want.
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There's a bucket this all goes into, and an easy label is Once-In-a-Lifetime Experience. They come in good and not-good varieties, as well as everywhere in between. And in these few short years, I’ve had a couple of these events.

Because going to Antarctica is one of those as well.

When we were all on the ship, one of my favourite experiences was something called Symposium-at-Sea, which was a 3-minute TED-talk style, where we had a chance to introduce ourselves and our work.

Photo by Oli Sansom​

One woman on the ship, Dr Sarah Lucas, who works as a senior paediatric register based in Sydney, Australia, gave her talk was about the human face of medicine. She explained that what keeps her hope alive was the thought that someone in that room, maybe one of these women scientists, will be the one to discover and develop a treatment - like for her patient Rio, who arrived at the ICU as a toddler, and died a few months later, from a rare and incurable condition. His legacy has been kept alive by his family here.

The room erupted into tears, and now a bunch of moms wanting to try and call home...and then another Sarah, Dr Sarah Hamylton, took it one step further.

She asked: What can your profession, one that by default must deal with grief on occasion, teach my profession?

​Dr Sarah Hamylton works as a coral reef scientist and her research maps coral reef bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.

And on this day, she realized that she deals with grief too, but there's no obvious way to define it, or even a way to talk about it.

So we sat down to have a fascinating conversation about how different disciplines can help each other in not obvious ways.

Here’s a short clip of this fascinating interview from the ship. One that has stayed with me for years.