‘Mama please share my story’: Charlotte’s final wish ‘life gets too hard’
The parents of a Sydney year 7 student who took her own life have reluctantly shared their most raw and private grief in the hope it helps other children who are suffering. That was Charlotte’s wish.
NSW
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Exclusive: In little pink handwriting 12-year-old Charlotte wrote desperate notes to her mum and dad as she sat in her bedroom, preparing to end her pain once and for all.
She wrote down the names of children she wanted at her funeral, names of students she said had made her “life too hard” and begged her mum to “tell the school please”.
The message, though, that will be etched in the minds of Charlotte’s mum and dad - and the one that has given them the strength to push aside their raw gut instinct to grieve in private - is the note that said: “Mama, please share my story to raise awareness.”
In a harrowing exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the brave Mat and Kelly took a tentative step forward in their quest to make sure Charlotte’s death is not in vain.
Holding back tears Kelly recalled how she saw the flickers of pink handwriting while Mat frantically tried to bring back Charlotte — “her Queen Bee Diva, amazing angel, the star on top of the Christmas tree”.
“I saw little pink writing saying, ‘Please, Mama, live for Will because I can’t anymore.”
Will is the little brother Charlotte adored.
Just 17 months earlier Charlotte had collapsed to the ground in sheer joy when her mum shared the news she was expecting.
The next year she didn’t even have a birthday wish — her new brother was all she wanted.
“She would be really, really heartbroken to think that she would ever be described as something that ruined our lives, so her death, as devastating as it is, can’t ruin our lives, because she’s what made us whole,” Kelly said.
“So we’re just going to live in love for her. We are still going to watch movies on the couch. We’re still gonna to judge everyone’s outfit, we are going to do all those things she loved to do. Live for her, and we are going to make change for her.”
Kelly is haunted by a misguided guilt that she didn’t do enough, did too much, gave the wrong advice, wasn’t empathetic enough, as she tried to help her daughter navigate the rollercoaster of friendship issues during Year 5, Year 6 and Year 7 at Santa Sabina College in Sydney.
She wasn’t the only mum concerned about the “toxic” goings on. Girls being included, girls being ostracised — in one day and out the next.
“Us mums couldn’t control it. We would talk and say ‘oh no here we go again, who’s not talking to who?’”
Charlotte cared so much about being accepted, a spring in a step on a good day, incessantly scratching her arms until they bled on others.
Charlotte’s dad agrees that Charlotte was “broken down over a three-year stint, because the toxicity was allowed to breed” at the school.
“That word toxic is a word that Kelly and I have used to describe it. I’ve also had other parents call us and say the same thing. This is not an isolated incident and it continues.
“When the most recent case of bullying was raised, the school simply said it was investigated and the girls denied it. That’s it. Case closed. Move on.”
Despite dozens of emails, phone calls and verbal conversations about Charlotte’s anxiety, stress and sadness during the past three years, things got better for snippets of time — but never longlasting.
Mat says there were times he believes students just need to be separated.
“Teachers are the adults. I wouldn’t allow two of my kids at home to fight and carry on like this.
“We as parents give schools responsibility for our most precious children.
“We put them in their care, and they have a duty of care and that duty of care isn’t to go ‘oh no, we can’t intervene’. It is to resolve it.
“I don’t care if it’s a public school, a private school, independent or Catholic. You have a duty of care for those kids, and you have to step in as an adult.”
Both Kelly and Mat describe Charlotte as an incredibly kind and highly emotional little girl, oozing with passion and empathy.
“She felt big emotion, she really felt everything,” Mat said.
“And so if people were mean to her she felt it. If people loved her she felt it.”
“As a mum you try to teach them resilience but you know they are the way they are,” Kelly reflects.
“I wish I let her be the way she was rather than try to change her. I would tell her sometimes ‘don’t be their friend, don’t worry if they don’t want to be your friend, don’t worry about it.’ But that advice is haunting me now.”
Mat reassures her that her advice was sound.
“She didn’t need help on the emotional side, she had that in spades, she needed the help to not take all of those things to heart,” he said.
Like any parents faced with the hell of losing a child in such gut-wrenching circumstances, Mat and Kelly are struggling to piece together those last minutes of life.
“The other thing that is troubling for us is that we had such a great last day with her. I hadn’t seen her that happy coming home from school in a long time,” Mat said.
The family sat down to dinner, Charlotte’s favourite creamy chicken pasta and after dinner she worked on her maths study with her dad.
“We probably spent maybe an hour-and-a-half and she did brilliantly. Every question she got right she was doing these little happy dances.
“I hadn’t seen this side of her in a long, long time. She baked banana bread. I go to bed early because I get up early in the morning and she brought me a piece in.
“She skipped out of the room saying she’s going to make it all the time. She then spent time back with her mum and brother playing with him, said good night and skipped off, literally skipped off to have a shower and go to bed.
“That’s the last time we saw her alive and we could not understand what had happened.”
Mat said he did not accept the police explanation that often when somebody decides what they are going to do they come to terms with it and often try to make everybody feel comfortable.
“We don’t accept that. We were planning our holidays for summer holidays, and we were tossing up, do we spend a week on Hamilton Island for the holiday, or do we do a two-week road trip?
“Charlotte wanted the road trip and was looking forward to that. She has discussed what math she wanted me to help her with tomorrow night.
“This is not a girl that was planning on doing this. Something happened when she went to her bedroom.”
Police have Charlotte’s phone, scrolling through messages to get clues of what might have pushed her over the edge.
They understand that’s protocol but nevertheless it prolongs their limbo.
Then there’s Ava, the little girl who was communicating with and comforting Charlotte in the minutes before her death — one of two online friends that Kelly and Mat didn’t even know Charlotte had.
Now they are grateful their girl had someone to turn to in her time of despair.
But with that comes more guilt for Kelly who knows that her daughter, when at her lowest, “just needed comfort, needed a hug”.
“Why didn’t she come and get me to give her a hug that night?” her mum said through tears.
Also haunting her is apparently some students took very personal information Charlotte had shared and “weaponised it, teasing her about it, embarrassing her about it”.
“You don’t expect to share things only to have them chucked in your face, but they are little girls and they do make mistakes. You want adults to intervene,” Mat said.
For the grieving parents it’s the behaviour of adults, not children, that they want in the spotlight.
The couple says schools all over the country need to be educated on how to intervene immediately when issues are raised.
“There needs to be a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to bullying,” Mat said.
They are confident in their belief that the school had seen the signs that Charlotte was struggling and the “toxic cycle” was having a dangerous impact on their little girl.
“She was found in the toilets at school, crying, saying she wanted to end her life,” Kelly said. It was less than one month before she died.
“She got sent home. They told me what had happened and that she needed to come home and she needed a medical certificate before she could come back to school,” her mum said.
“We felt the onus was always on Charlotte to cope better and not enough time spent to
uncover why she felt that way. What happened to you today to make you feel this way? Did
something happen here at school this morning?”
“As parents we increased her visits to see her GP and had her attend regular external counselling sessions.
“During one of her GP visits Charlotte opened up to talk of the bullying she was receiving at school. The GP was very clear ‘this is harassment’, she stated.
“Again, we went back to the school with this information only to be told ‘This is not harassment, this is just very juvenile behaviour’.”
Fed up, Kelly and Mat decided to start looking for new schools.
“We told her we didn’t know if we could get her into a great school immediately but our plan was to move her at the end of the term. That would have been in two weeks’ time. She never made it.”
Charlotte’s spiral started towards the end of year 5.
The “friendship issues” began and her parents thought it wise to get her seeing a counsellor to manage her anxiety.
Kelly hoped things would change as the girls went into high school.
“Towards the end of year 6, I think everyone was on such a high of going to high school that it really settled down,” she said.
“I hoped she would spread her wings in high school and there would be new girls, new friends.
“Some girls did that, they spread out. Charlotte would be floating. Towards the end of last term we were on the way to school one day and her blazer lifted up and her whole arm was covered in scratches.
“She brushed it off, saying she was itchy. I said you’re not itchy, you’re doing this to yourself and she basically said it was because she gets so overwhelmed.
“I took her to her counsellor but in hindsight it’s almost like the scratching was a coping mechanism and taking that away from her bringing it out of private, she really starts to go downhill.”
A school representative said in a text to Kelly they had given Charlotte all the love and support that she needed.
“Yes, the school had offered Charlotte counselling but equally they should have stopped the issue when it was originally raised.
“It shouldn’t have to be raised multiple times and again, why is the focus on those that have been affected rather than those that are causing it in the first place.”
For a mum with such a close relationship with her daughter, the cycle was devastating.
“I would be in the car, and I can see it on her face, and I’ll ask the whole way to school.
“One day she just burst into tears, and she said, ‘Everybody hates me. I’m a monster. I’ve got no friends. They’re so mean to me. They hate me. They hate me. Everyone’s mean to me’.”
Tears well in Kelly’s eyes as she grapples with thoughts that she gave her daughter the wrong advice.
“I hugged her and said ‘Charlotte, if these girls don’t want to be friends, you’ve got to get over it.
“We just move on. I advised her success is the best revenge and if she went to the library for a few days at lunch and did her homework she would eventually come by a like-minded person and she would be happy.
For Mat it’s black and white: “If you don’t want to be friends with someone you don’t have to be friends with them but it crosses the line when you go out of your way to make an individual miserable? Hitting her with your school bag, and then going, whoops, sorry, didn’t see you, barking at her. Who does that?”
“Unfortunately kids these days get no rest from it. When I was a kid and you had an issue with someone you left it at school unless you were prepared to turn up face-to-face on someone’s doorstep and face their parents.
“You’d get a good night’s sleep and quite often things were not as bad the next morning. But now there is no escape.”
Mat called on all schools across the state to read Charlotte’s story, to hear her message and to go to school on Monday and have the courage to have the hard conversations.
“This is about preventing this from happening again moving forward,” he said.
“Absolutely every school, off the back of reading this article, needs to organise a meeting on Monday morning for a full review of their policy.
“Say, this policy we have, is it the most appropriate policy for us now, bearing in mind lessons we’ve learnt?”
Mat is angry that when news broke of Charlotte’s death by Ben Fordham on his 2GB breakfast show, the school contradicted reports the couple had contacted the school via emails, calls and face-to-face discussions more than a dozen times saying “that doesn’t match our records”.
“What they should have said was Kelly, Mat please come in, let us hear what you think, where you think you’ve been let down because we want to do better. Clearly, we have failed together. We’ve lost a little girl.”
“While the school has sent a few text messages to Kelly I am yet to hear from the school. No email, no text, no call,” Mat said.
He was touched however that the school gave students the opportunity to write messages and bring flowers to school in honour of Charlotte and had the chapel open to all students and parents and broader community.
When contacted by The Sunday Telegraph, Santa Sabina College defended its handling of bullying in general, saying their anti-bullying policy was available on their website.
“In the past week, I have been overwhelmed by the number of emails and messages from our families that talk about their children feeling safe and cared for at SantaSabina College, and objecting to the portrayal of our College as failing to deal with matters that cause distress amongst our students,” Principal Paulina Skerman said
As Mat and Kelly plan their daughter’s funeral, buoyed by the support of family, friends, parents from the school community and kind strangers, they are also finding a certain peace from honouring Charlotte’s wish and sharing her story.
“I feel like she was the sweetest, kindest, toughest, strongest little diva you’ve ever met in your life,” Kelly said.
“She just had such a big heart and she felt things hard, but since she passed, I feel like my back is straighter and my heart is stronger, like she gave me her strength. This is for her. This is Charlotte’s wish.”
The family asks that in lieu of flowers or donations please give to the Kids Helpline.
Do you have a story for The Telegraph? Email cydonee.mardon@news.com.au
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