SBS: Storyline Australia: After Maeve

Artwork by Maeve, “Cat and Moon” 

In November 2003, ten-year-old Maeve Coughlan died in a pedestrian accident on a cycling trip in Queensland. Maeve’s parents, Robyn, a paediatric emergency physician, and Frank, a social worker, decided to document their journey as a way of honouring Maeve’s creative spirit in their ongoing lives.

Before her death, Maeve spent many hours drawing and writing about an unknown planet located just behind Pluto - Planet Creature. On Thursday, 21 September, SBS Television will screen After Maeve in the Storyline Australia timeslot. This is the story of how one family survived the most painful experience than can befall any parent - the loss of a child. It is also a story of love and discovery.

As a paediatric emergency physician, Robyn Brady was familiar with the territory of the death of children. But nothing in her training had prepared her for the shock of losing her own child. Frank and Robyn have another daughter, Tara, who has Down’s syndrome. Unable to fully articulate her feelings towards the event, Tara expresses her feelings through dance. On Planet Creature (www.planetcreature.com.au) cats reign supreme and everything can fly.

It has its own dialect, laws and an ethical creed and is off-limits to adults. After Maeve’s death, her friends were sure she had gone to Planet Creature and tried, often, to email her. In the months following Maeve’s death, Robyn discovered the extent of Maeve’s imaginary world. She immersed herself in the reams of drawings and writings she discovered in her daughter’s room.

Maeve’s friends continued visiting Robyn and Frank and as time went on, they decided that they could break their code of silence and talk about what they had shared with Maeve. In the documentary, Maeve’s world literally comes to life through the use of animation and the creation of the Planet Creature website.

In After Maeve, Robyn and Frank chart a journey through their grief by celebrating this world and maintaining their connection with Maeve. Robyn eventually writes a children’s book based upon Maeve’s alter ego. It is a healing process for her family as well as her friends.

“Losing our daughter in 2003 plummeted us into a different sphere,” says Robyn. “My paediatric practice changed as I renegotiated the meaning of being a physician in a worldview in which loss played such an inevitable part, and I opened up wide the floodgates of creative and interactive art and story-making in my “other life”.”