Kirsten O'Connor on Grief, Truth, and Talking About the Unthinkable
Content note: This post discusses suicide, self-harm, sexual assault, and grief in depth. Please take care of yourself as you read. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 (US), or go to your nearest emergency room.
Some conversations are not easy to have. They are not meant to be. They are meant to crack something open — to say the things most people are too afraid to say out loud — so that the people who need to hear them the most know they are not alone.
Episode 61 of On the Spectrum with Sonia is one of those conversations. Host Sonia Krishna Chand sits down with Kirsten O'Connor, an author from New Zealand whose daughter Kalia died by suicide at 24 years old. Kirsten has since written The Year After Kalia, a memoir written from inside the wreckage of grief, and is currently working on a second book called Silence, which addresses suicidality directly.
This is a conversation about love, loss, the dangerous myths we hold about suicide, and what it actually looks like to hold space for someone in pain — without flinching, without turning away.
Table of Contents
Who Was Kalia?
The Face of Mental Health Nobody Shows You
Early Signs, and What Kirsten Didn't Know Yet
Escaping Abuse, Finding Each Other
The Assault That Changed Everything
What the Last Year Looked Like
Suicide Is Not a Choice — Not in the Way People Mean
Writing From the Wreckage
What to Say, What Not to Say, and Why Silence Is the Worst Option
What Kirsten Wants You to Know
Who Was Kalia?
Before anything else, Kirsten wants you to know who her daughter was. Not just the circumstances of her death, but the living, laughing, full-of-life person she was for 24 years.
Kalia was musical. Her grandfather taught her to play guitar, and she had an incredible voice. She wrote her own songs. She and her mum would watch Mamma Mia together and she would belt out The Winner Takes It All at the top of her lungs — it was her signature song. She was cremated with her guitar.
She was funny, fiercely loyal, and deeply empathetic. She had a psychology degree and worked in human resources right up until her death. She made elaborate chocolate cakes so rich you could only manage a small sliver. She had a close group of five girlfriends who had moved through life together since they were young and still do today.
"She was the better version of me," Kirsten says. "She was highly empathetic, she was loyal, she would always be with you in a crisis and stand by you. She was a very talented young girl."
She also called Kirsten her soul mate.
This matters. Because what this episode is really about — before it is about anything else — is a person. A whole, beloved, irreplaceable person.
The Face of Mental Health Nobody Shows You
One of the most important things Kirsten says early in this conversation is this: Kalia presented beautifully. She smiled. She laughed. She showed up for people. She was someone you would look at from the outside and never imagine was struggling.
"People that suffer from mental health can have a wonderful life and be amazing to be around," Kirsten says. "It's not always what it's depicted as. She always presented well. She always smiled and joked and laughed. But she was also depressed and also had anxiety and also had underlying mental health conditions."
This gap — between how someone appears and what they are carrying — is one of the reasons people miss the signs. It is also one of the reasons people don't reach out for help. If you always seem fine to everyone around you, asking for help can feel incongruent, even dishonest. And for Kalia, looking okay meant people often assumed she was.
If you love someone who always seems fine and you have a quiet worry in the back of your mind about them — this episode is for you.
Early Signs
Early Signs, and What Kirsten Didn't Know Yet
Kalia's first experience of mental health struggles began around age 12, though she didn't have the language for it then, and neither did Kirsten. By 15 or 16, Kirsten noticed self-harm marks on her daughter's body.
Her response at the time, she reflects with complete honesty, was shaped by ignorance rather than cruelty. She thought it was attention-seeking. She told Kalia to stop. She didn't yet understand that self-harm is often a coping mechanism for emotional pain that has nowhere else to go — and that simply telling someone to stop does nothing to address the pain underneath it.
Kirsten does not tell this story to shame herself. She tells it because it was the truth of what she knew then, and because so many parents, friends, and partners find themselves in the same position, seeing the signs without having the framework to understand what they are seeing.
By 16 to 18, things were harder. Kalia was withdrawing, had run away from home, and was struggling with anxiety. Part of this was rooted in the household environment at the time — Kirsten was in a controlling, emotionally abusive relationship, and the dynamic was affecting the whole family. Kalia's birth father was also largely absent, which contributed to a deep sense of abandonment.
Her school counsellor, however, was a turning point. He taught her chess — forward thinking, strategy, planning ahead — and she threw herself into songwriting and performance. At 18, she found her footing again. She went to university, got some distance from the household tension, and by her own account had moved into a much better place.
She felt proud of herself for getting through it. And she had. For a time.
Escaping Abuse, Finding Each Other
When Kalia was around 19, Kirsten finally left the relationship. It had been emotionally abusive, financially controlling, and deeply isolating. Kirsten didn't even know, she says, that what she had been living through counted as abuse — not until a counsellor named it plainly for her.
"She said to me, You know that you're in an abusive relationship, don't you? And I said, No, I didn't. I had no idea."
This is something both Kirsten and Sonia speak to with real understanding in the episode: emotional abuse doesn't announce itself. It happens gradually, layer by layer, until the person inside it genuinely cannot see what the person outside it can. And for Kalia, who had lived through this dynamic from age seven, the damage had been accumulating for years.
What followed Kirsten leaving was, by both their accounts, a genuinely good period. The two of them rebuilt. They talked. They uncovered what had really been happening. They made a pact: total honesty, complete openness, nothing left unsaid. No more silence enforced by someone else's need for control.
"We decided to become completely open with each other," Kirsten says, "and nothing would rupture us again."
That pact would matter enormously in the years that followed. It is also, in many ways, why this book exists at all.
The Assault That Changed Everything
Kalia was 22, had moved into a shared flat with friends her own age, had a boyfriend she loved, and was — by every outward measure — embracing her life. Then, at a joint birthday party, she was sexually assaulted.
It took a year to find a therapist through the New Zealand public system, even though sexual assault cases can be publicly funded. A year of carrying it, largely alone.
When she called her mum, she described it as being "taken advantage of." Kirsten gently but firmly corrected the language. You weren't taken advantage of. You were raped. She wanted the weight of what had happened named properly — not to be harsher, but to take the blame away. Kalia had been wondering: was I too friendly? Was I too nice? Kirsten's answer was immediate: you were not too anything.
Kalia never reported the assault. Kirsten, who had a legal background, made a clear-eyed and painful decision to advise against it. She knew what the court process would put her daughter through. She knew the statistics. She knew what "his word against hers" looked like in practice.
"Your responsibility," she told Kalia, "is your health and how you're feeling. It is not your responsibility to put yourself through something harmful to prevent it happening to someone else."
Some people pushed back on that choice. Kalia was told to her face that if she didn't report it, he would go on to do it again. Kirsten is direct on this point: placing the responsibility of a predator's future actions onto a traumatised young woman is wrong. Full stop.
It was a year after the assault that Kalia first told her mother she was having suicidal thoughts.
What the Last Year Looked Like
From Kalia's first attempt to her death was just over a year. In that time, she tried everything she could. Kirsten is emphatic about this — her daughter wanted to live. She wanted to get better.
She had a wonderful doctor who saw her regularly and genuinely cared for her. She was prescribed antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication, though the medication caused weight gain and stopped her from running — two things that had been important to her mental health and her sense of herself. She worked with an art therapist who used creative projects to help Kalia externalise the thoughts crowding her mind. She was a great overthinker, and expressing herself through art genuinely helped.
There were setbacks along the way. A job loss. A breakup. The growing sense — as Kirsten describes it with real pain — that her illness was pushing people away. Friends got busy. People didn't know how to respond to someone who had made multiple attempts. Some withdrew to protect themselves, which is human, but which Kalia — in the distorted thinking that severe depression creates — read as confirmation that she was a burden, that she was too much, that the people around her would be better off without her.
"After multiple attempts, people didn't know how to deal with her," Kirsten says. "Depression is very hard to sit around. So people were moving away from her life. She was feeling more and more isolated."
She did not die because she was not loved. She died because the pain became too much.
Suicide Is Not a Choice, Not in the Way People Mean
This is the part of the episode Kirsten most wants people to hear. It is why she is writing her second book, Silence. And it is the most important thing she has to say.
There is a narrative, still present and still damaging, that suicide is a choice. That people who die by suicide chose not to fight, chose not to stay, chose their family and friends less than they chose death. Kirsten has also sat with the grief of parents who have asked, agonisingly, why their child didn't choose them.
She dismantles this myth with the quiet authority of someone who has lived with it every day.
"Kalia didn't want to die," she says. "She just wanted to not have pain and to not feel trapped and not feel like she was a burden. That's not a choice. It's from a damaged brain. When you're in pain, you get out of it. That's what the brain is doing. It's not you and I sitting here today thinking, shall I do this? It's nothing like that. It's at a time where the pain becomes so much that survival becomes about death — because the survival is getting rid of the pain."
And to anyone carrying the weight of believing they were not enough to keep someone here: "If love could have saved her, I would have saved her. There is nothing I wouldn't have done. She always knew she was loved."
Love was not insufficient. The illness was that powerful. Those are not the same thing.
The Year After Kalia is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kindle, and as an audiobook. Find it and Kirsten's grief resources at thisisgrief.nz
What to Say, What Not to Say
One of the most practically useful parts of this conversation is when Kirsten and Sonia talk about how to actually show up for someone who is struggling — and what stops most people from doing it.
Fear. Almost always, it is fear. Fear of saying the wrong thing, of making it worse, of not knowing the right words. So people say nothing. They change the subject. They offer a platitude and close the conversation. They go quiet.
Kirsten's message is plain: silence is the worst option. It leaves people feeling unseen. It signals, however unintentionally, that their pain is too big to sit with.
On the question of whether to ask someone directly if they are thinking about suicide — yes. Ask. You can say it plainly: are you thinking about ending your life? Asking does not plant the idea. It does not push someone closer to the edge. What it does — often — is give someone permission to be honest for the very first time.
"By being direct with someone, and someone feels seen and then hopefully heard, that can actually help them," Kirsten says. "Ignoring it does nothing."
And if you say the wrong thing in the moment — which you might, because you are human and scared — you can correct yourself. You can say, I'm sorry, that came out wrong, can you tell me more? The conversation does not have to be perfect to be valuable. It just has to happen.
She also takes on some of the most harmful myths directly: that suicidal people are doing it for attention, that they are being selfish. "They get to the point where they actually feel they are a burden and that people would be better off," she says. "That is not selfishness. That is a damaged brain."
This is also work that Sonia brings into her emotion coaching practice — helping neurodivergent adults, and the people around them, develop the emotional vocabulary and relational safety to have the hard conversations before they become urgent ones. If that kind of support is something you are looking for, you can explore emotion coaching with Sonia here
What Kirsten Wants You to Know
There is no right way to grieve. There is no timeline. There are no stages to move through in order. You do not have to find purpose in loss, write a book, build something meaningful, or arrive anywhere in particular. You are allowed to simply survive it, in whatever form that takes for you.
"You can't do grieving wrong," Kirsten says. "There's no rule book. You do it the way you need to do it. And that is okay."
She also says something that might surprise people: she does not want her grief to go away. Her grief is her love for Kalia, still present and still moving. "I will grieve her until the day that I die. And that's okay."
What she has built since — the website, the books, the conversations — she describes as continuing the story Kalia started. Keeping her present. Honouring her. But she is careful not to frame this as the right way, or the only way, or the better way. It is her way.
What she does ask of all of us is simpler than that: don't look away. Don't go quiet. Don't let the fear of saying the wrong thing stop you from saying anything. Ask the person you are worried about how they really are. Use the word if you need to. Sit in the discomfort with them.
"The only thing you can do with someone that is suicidal," she says, "is to be there. Just sit in their space and listen to the uncomfortable."
That is enough. That matters. That can be the thing that makes the difference.
Listen to the full conversation with Kirsten O'Connor on Episode 61 of On the Spectrum with Sonia
To find Kirsten's books and grief resources, visit https://thisisgrief.nz/book-2. The Year After Kalia is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle, Apple Books, and as an audiobook.
If you or someone you know is in crisis: call or text 988 (US Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or go to your nearest emergency room.
