About me
I'm Dr Leigh Donovan, Consultant in Thanatology.
Thanatology is the study of death and dying, loss and grief in all its forms. It explores what people go through at the end of life, how loved ones grieve, and how different communities approach death. It embraces the emotional, social, and spiritual elements of humanity in the face of death and dying, loss and grief.
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At Collaboraide, I draw on these principles across three areas of service:
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Specialist Grief Counselling, led by love and driven by expertise. I help people like you build a supportive relationship with your grief, to become more anchored as you navigate your way through the turbulence of grief.
Clinical Supervision, informed by over twenty years of clinical practice. I offer reflective supervision for practitioners working in palliative care, grief and bereavement counselling, and related fields, helping you to sustain your wellbeing while providing quality, compassionate care to others.
Project and Research Consultancy, working in collaboration with organisations extending care and support to the palliative and bereavement care sectors in Australia. I bring evidence informed insights to improve services and support systems related to death, dying, grief and bereavement.
Grief is not a medical disorder to be cured. Grief is not a spiritual crisis to be resolved. Grief is not a social woe to be addressed.
Grief is, simply, a matter of the heart — to be felt. Joanne Cacciatore
More about me
I graduated from a Social Work degree at the University of Queensland in 2001. I was a mature student. It had taken me turning down a few roads to find the one that made sense to me. By this time, I had married and had three children. Life was full. I soon found a professional home in the health sector, working in tertiary adult hospitals in Melbourne and Brisbane. Then moved to the Royal Children’s Hospital, Brisbane to commence a role as a Paediatric Oncology Social Worker. Each of these contexts exposed me to the myriad of losses experienced by those I cared for. Patients with new life altering diagnoses, life-threatening health conditions. Families left bereft by the death of their person. I could see that loss, and with this, grief, was all around me. Yet I felt ill equipped in knowing how to respond.
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Without knowing it then, my curiosity and interest in loss and grief became my life’s work. I became very interested in the experience of bereavement. From where I sat, it looked incredibly lonely, isolating, confusing and misunderstood, both by the person experiencing the loss and their community. In 2010 I was privileged to be invited into the inaugural role of Bereavement Coordinator in Queensland’s new Paediatric Palliative Care Service. Creating this new Bereavement Service left me with more questions than answers and I took my questions into a PhD ‘Are we meeting the needs of bereaved parents in Australia’.
Many years of advocacy saw me realise a vision to create the Children’s Health Queensland Bereavement Service. A model of care that sought to reach families throughout Queensland whose child had died. This program was informed by a Churchill Fellowship I undertook in 2018, visiting and learning from similar programs in children’s hospitals and hospices in the USA, Canada, the UK and South Africa.
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By now I had allies by my side, many of which were bereaved parents themselves. Parents I had met when they were raw and reeling in a world of pain following the death of their child. These parents were now ten years beyond the death of their child and in them something had shifted. They had energy, motivation and a deep desire to ensure no parent in the future would experience the lack of support they experienced when their child died. Together we made magic happen. Out of profound suffering, arose immense comfort in knowing they could make a difference to others. I could see that loss could transform over time. Their pain remained, a reminder of their beloved child held close in their heart and memory. Yet the weighty cloak of grief was no longer a permanent fixture. They had greater capacity to remove the cloak, hang it up, feel a little lighter, knowing that they had a little more control over how and when to wear this cloak of grief. The cloak that represented their child.
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By now I had experienced my own series of losses. I had my own sense of what this cloak can feel like.
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And somehow in life, when this cloak envelopes our lives, we are expected to continue as we were. The same partner, parent, child, friend, colleague or employee. We are not the same. We will never be that person again. We remain changed forevermore.
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Armed with this wisdom and experience I created Collaboraide, an independent consultancy that extends care, mentorship and leadership in the context of loss and grief, death, dying and bereavement.
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I have been on this journey for over twenty five years, and the lessons I have learned about loss and grief, can now help you.
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