Jackie Perry and Debbie Jackson celebrate funding for a new grief camp for women. Photo: Facebook.
A new camp for women grappling with the aftermath of a loved one’s suicide is coming to Cape York in early 2025.
Talk About It Tuesday founders Debbie Jackson and Jackie Perry, who both lost their sons to suicide on a Tuesday, started the support group after feeling like they did not have a safe space to open up about their grief.
Now, they will fulfil the long-time dream of providing Cape York women in a similar situation with a grief camp after receiving funding from the Northern Queensland Primary Health Network (NQPHN) Targeted Regional Initiative for Suicide Prevention program grant.
“When you’re going through the loss of somebody with suicide, it’s a very lonely road, and it’s not only just suicide, it’s grief in general,” Ms Jackson said.
“In all honesty, you really don’t know what they’re going through until you’ve gone through it yourself – you can only imagine, and then times that by 10 or 100 – there are no words.
“I just want to help women get through that – just give them a little bit of space to have like-minded women here with them, so they know they aren’t alone.”
As a mother, Ms Jackson said when she lost her son Dillon 10 years ago, she struggled to find the time and space to properly deal with her grief.
“Mothers are the nurturers – we go home, and we’ve still got to keep going,” she said.
“For example, when I lost Dillon, I still had to keep functioning as a person, I still had to function as a mother, and it would have been nice to have some tools.
“I just got really busy, and it probably wasn’t a great thing for me, because once I stopped being busy, I fell apart.”
The camp will be built on Ms Jackson’s property at Wolverton Station, near Archer River, with most of the funding to go towards getting mental health facilitators, both from the Cape and externally, for women to “find new tools to help them get through their everyday life”.
Ms Jackson said they were overwhelmed with the funding support from NQPHN for community-led mental health initiatives such as the grief camp.
“We are totally humbled to get the funding; we just threw our hat in the ring, and we didn’t think we’d get anywhere with it, but we did,” she said.
“I’ve always wanted to do something for women in Cape York, because they have all these retreats down south, and there’s nothing like that here.
“Jackie and I, we’re not speakers, we’re not anything, and yet, who would have thought that us two little old girls in Cape York have got some motions happening.”
The RFDS has a mental health team, which can be contacted on 07 4040 0444 or by emailing [email protected] , or you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
As someone who truly understands loss and grief, Ms Jackson said she hoped to be a support beam for women in a similar situation. Photo: Facebook.
