The Australia Fires, and Other Forms of Loss

By Hanieka Balint

Courtesy of The New York Times

Last August I watched Lulu Wang’s masterpiece The Farewell, a movie about a young woman named Billi who goes back to China to say goodbye to her dying grandmother. When she returns to Beijing for the first time in years, she sees that the place where she grew up has grown unfamiliar, and that she has to mourn more than one loss. I cried with Billi as she visited her grandfather’s grave, struggled to speak Mandarin, and learned that her childhood home was demolished and redeveloped. By the movie’s close, I realized that The Farewell is not just about saying goodbye to a grandparent; it’s also about saying goodbye to an environment that was once called home.

It’s an experience that is almost as common for our generation as losing a grandparent, both of which have become my reality in the months following my day at the movie theatre. 

Just before Thanksgiving I got the message that my grandfather had sepsis and was just admitted to a hospital near his home in Geelong. He wasn’t expected to survive the night, and my mother was on the nearest flight to Australia to go say goodbye to him.

7-year old Hanieka at her grandfather’s house in Geelong, Australia

I immediately searched for plane tickets online, then paused. It takes 33 hours to get to Australia from Boston, but it takes less than 24 hours for a man to die of sepsis. I didn’t have enough time to see him, and even if I made it to his bedside on time it wouldn’t make a difference to him– he would not have recognized me after all of these years anyways. In the hardest decision I ever made, I closed my laptop, sat on my bed, and did nothing. I would have to say goodbye to him from afar.

In the weeks that followed, I grieved the loss of someone who I never really knew. I asked my parents about him and found out that he grew up on a rubber farm, and spent some of his life flying helicopters to deliver packages to remote places in the Outback. I found old photos from the last time I was in Geelong, and I marveled at how young I was back then. I called my cousins and spoke to my grandmother for the first time in years, resolving to renew my Australian passport, visit again in the summer, and get to know my family and my country a little better. 

And then the bushfires started.

Every day new reports came in with scarier numbers. Dozens of people and thousands of animals dying, and even more being injured or displaced. My cousins sent me videos of smoky skies, and my grandmother had a grassfire come dangerously close to her home. The animal sanctuary that I visited as a kid became overwhelmed with injured koalas, kangaroos, and wallabies, many of which were unable to be saved.

The country that I come from is being destroyed. And the kind of grief that these fires are causing feel uncannily familiar to the grief caused by my grandfather’s passing. I know that I am losing something close to me, but I don’t really know what it is that I am losing.

In my favorite movie the protagonist was able to see her dying grandparent and say farewell. In my life I wasn’t afforded that same opportunity. I know that it is too late to get to know my mother’s father– I know that it is too late for a lot of things. But I also know that at the end of my co-op this summer I will finally have the time and the resources to go to Geelong again. I’m looking forward to getting to know my country a little better and creating new memories with my family as an adult. I am prepared to come back to a different place than the one I left years ago. But it is not time to say farewell to Australia just yet.