Australian Senator Janet Rice tears up in front of Australian Parliament as she grieves her wife and all of the lives lost in the wildfires.
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00:00But maybe some of the other things I've learnt over the five months since Penny died can
00:05be useful in helping us how to work out how to deal with the losses of this summer and
00:11how to move on onto our new path.
00:14My wife Penny died in September.
00:17As well as being the love of my life, Penny was one of Australia's leading climate scientists.
00:22She worked at CSIRO for 30 years preparing regional climate projections, the science
00:28that lays out how our climate is changing across the country and that has laid out the
00:35increasing risk of longer, more intense, more damaging fire seasons.
00:42I've discovered that grief isn't compartmentalised.
00:46I'm grieving for Penny and I'm grieving for our precious planet, particularly the forests
00:50and the wildlife that we both loved so much and campaigned so hard to protect.
00:56And when I think of the people who lost loved ones in the fires, I can so easily imagine
01:02their devastating grief and loss because I've experienced the same randomness of the universe
01:08that has resulted in sudden, unexpected, unfathomable death.
01:15I'm angry that Penny's climate science and her decades of campaigning seem to have been
01:21for naught right now.
01:24Penny was so fearful of what this summer was going to deliver and I'm mortified that
01:29her fears have come to pass.
01:32There's a tiny sense of relief that at least she was spared seeing them play out in such
01:37a devastating way.
01:39But maybe some of the other things I've learnt over the five months since Penny died can
01:44be useful in helping us how to work out how to deal with the losses of this summer and
01:49how to move on onto our new path.
01:52I've learnt that expressing and acknowledging loss, bawling my eyes out and sharing the
01:57emotion with others is cathartic.
02:01And I've learnt that you can never have too many hugs and that people reaching out to
02:05me with a simple, I'm so sorry, is profound and touching and helps me know that I'm not
02:11alone.
02:12So to everyone who has lost people they love, who have lost property, had their communities
02:17turned upside down, seen the destruction of country they love.
02:22I'm so sorry.
02:25I've learnt that grief is the flip side of love.
02:29I've learnt that our relationships make up a huge part of who we are and that nurturing
02:33and cherishing those relationships is core to our wellbeing.
02:38When Penny died, I didn't just lose her, I lost a massive part of myself, that part of
02:43my identity, that was the love, the connection, the interplay between the two of us.
02:49And I realised how much the other relationships I have with friends, colleagues and acquaintances
02:54matter and are part of me too.
02:58So if expressing our grief for our losses of this summer can encourage people to reach
03:03out and to connect with and reconnect with people they love, that's a powerful step on
03:09this new path that we are now walking together.
03:13And I've realised that these relationships, these connections that are part of me, don't
03:18just stop at connections with other humans.
03:21We are part of nature.
03:23All is one and one is all.
03:25The profound grief that we are feeling about the loss of nature and the damage to precious
03:31landscapes, the billions of animals lost, is because they are part of us and we are
03:36part of them and we love them as we love ourselves.
03:39We can't just let them go, be sacrificed to the gods of greed and selfishness, the blatant
03:45willful vandals who are overheating our planet.
03:49We can but hope that as more people feel this loss deeply and powerfully, that it will motivate
03:56more of us to work to protect the rest of nature from the ravages of unbridled neoliberal
04:02capitalism.