Brooke Satchwell tracks down recipients of her fiance's organs in new drama
New Aussie drama Dear Life, from the creators of Upper Middle Bogan, looks at the strange and destructive ways people grieve — and how they live on.
A few years ago, screenwriter Robyn Butler asked herself a difficult question: What would my life look like if my husband died?
"I thought I would cling to my kids," she says.
"When you love someone deeply, you have that feeling every now and again. It makes you realise how much they mean to you."
Soon she began to wonder what that life would look like if she didn't have kids. Would it help to donate her husband's organs?
"If I had donated his heart, would that give me comfort knowing that that existed, living, breathing somewhere?" she says.
It sparked the idea for her latest TV show, Dear Life, co-created with her husband and creative partner, Wayne Hope.
It's the story of 40-something Lillian (Brooke Satchwell; The Twelve), who, reeling from the sudden death of her doctor fiance, Ash, starts to track down and make connections with the recipients of his organs.
Hope and Butler hope to explore more about Lillian — and the idea of finding yourself in your 40s — if Dear Life gets renewed. (Supplied: Stan/Jane Zhang)
That's not something you're supposed to do. Letters from recipients to donor families are anonymised to protect everyone's privacy.
But in Lillian's case, it was almost too easy to figure out who had written her a letter expressing their gratitude for Ash's heart — only one person had a heart transplant in Melbourne at that time.
Hope suggests there is something "cathartic" in the idea of donating your partner's organs — a feeling of connection that can break a person out of the insularity of grief.
"That notion of something living on is a practical way of grieving," he says. "There's some life to it. There's some sense to loss."
For Butler and Hope, the idea had all the ingredients of great drama.
"When you write drama, you always try to write about life and death," Butler says. "They're the big stakes.
"This is literally life and death. Someone has to die so someone else can live."
Relating to her character
During the pandemic, Satchwell spoke with her partner about organ donation — something she'd always supported intellectually, but had never looked into.
It was knowing that she had found her life partner that made her feel comfortable to finally sign up to be an organ donor.
"The profound effect that it can have on not just the recipient, but the people that love and care for them and the community that they're part of, to me, that just made sense," she says.