HEATHER Barrett was struggling to deal with her 24-year-old son’s unexpected death just five years after her husband’s death.
Her beloved son Michael had suffered for years with epileptic seizures following a football injury at school.
“One day, I went to visit him in his flat and found him dead,” she said.
“I just went into such a deep grief after this and kept thinking about all the things I might have done to help him.
“After several years, I accepted nothing was working so basically strapped on my backpack, put my faith totally in God, and hit the road.”
Heather laughs and agrees that had she been a teenager this behaviour might not have been unusual.
“But I was 51 at the time,” she said.
The convert to Catholicism, now a daily Mass-goer, would discover, on her eight-month pilgrimage to centres of traditional devotion around the world, the importance of heeding the promptings of the Holy Spirit.
“I learnt to put my trust totally in Him,” she says at her Norman Park home, in Brisbane, which she shares with four of her adult children, one of their partners and two grandchildren.
It was this awareness which kept Heather, daughter Bridie and sister Jenny safe, even in a gypsy camp in southern France into which they’d accidentally wandered thinking it was a caravanners’ club where they could stay for the night.
She’d return from her pilgrimage with many other stories to tell – of finding incredible peace every time she went to Mass in hundreds of churches and cathedrals, and of visiting Marian shrines where she had the time to “sit and cry and think about Michael’s life and reconcile myself with his death”.
There were innumerable highlights including her arrival in Rome in time to share with Aussies the joy of Mary MacKillop’s canonisation in 2010.
New Zealand-born Heather said her pilgrimage had started when she felt a calling to “step out in faith”.
“I felt basically my life had fallen into a bit of a rut,” she said.
“My husband’s death in 2002 was a dreadful shock to all of us.
“He was the captain of our ship and we never believed he was going to leave us.”
Shattered, she moved from the back of Nimbin with her five children, then teenagers, to a house in Lismore, northern NSW.
In time, the big six-bedroom house grew increasingly empty as one by one the children moved out, and it seemed her life was becoming increasingly quiet and predictable.
Discovering her son dead in his Lismore flat in 2007 changed everything.
“It was a nightmare which left me constantly tortured, asking myself if I could have done anything to change what happened,” she said.
“In 2010 I decided I was getting nowhere and determined to seek God’s will for the rest of my life.
“I was willing to join a religious community, helping Mother Teresa’s order in Calcutta or whatever.”
To become more aware of God’s plan for her, Heather decided to spend three days and nights of prayer and fasting in the little country church of St Patrick’s in Nimbin, northern NSW.
This church had a special significance for her.
“My husband’s requiem Mass had been there and he is buried nearby at Nimbin Cemetery as is my son Michael,” she said.
“We’d been going to this church on and off for 30 years so we’d had a significant association.
“I’d also go to the church every Saturday night and open up to pray the Rosary with friends, especially for the little township of Nimbin.
“On the fifth Sunday of the month there’d be Mass there so I’d go and open the church up for the priest.”
During her three days of discerning God’s will for her, Heather found nights the hardest.
She slept on a small bed kept for the use of visiting priests and other pastoral workers.
“On the first night I didn’t have a very comfortable sleep, and on the second night it was almost unbearable with various aches and pains and I was tossing and turning all night,” she said.
“In the end I heard God say ‘Get out of bed and walk around the church seven times’.
“I was thinking, ‘This is crazy; it’s my mind playing tricks on me’.
“But I couldn’t get it out of my mind so I walked around the inside of the church seven times, praying Hail Marys.
“I went back to bed and slept like a baby after that.
“That to me was a little lesson on how to obey God no matter how silly it sounds at the time.”
On the third day in St Patrick’s, Heather said she heard clearly God speaking.
“I could hear: ‘Go. Go. Yes, do it. Go.’ And I had a feeling of great joy.”
Confident in her new life direction, Heather packed up the Lismore house, giving the children, now living in various locations, all the furniture they needed.
Then she bought an around-the-world ticket to visit centres of Catholic devotion she had heard so much about.
First stop was Mexico where she met up with her daughter Bridie.
During their 10-day stopover they visited the shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
“What also intrigued me about Mexico was their devotion to St Jude – his statues were everywhere,” Heather said.
“He’s my favourite saint … I was born on his feast day so I’ve got a very special connection to St Jude.
“Also there were large numbers of Kombi vans and I’ve owned three in my time and they seemed to be every fifth vehicle in Mexico.
“So I was in seventh heaven just seeing all these Kombis and looking at all the statues and shrines of St Jude.
“Also the people were very open about their Catholic faith so it was just wonderful.”
From there she flew to London to meet up with her sister Jenny whom she’d only seen once in 15 years.
The three of them went thirds in a campervan and so began the next leg of the pilgrimage through the United Kingdom and Europe.
The campervan became known as “Jude”.
Throughout the whole pilgrimage, Heather says she ate only small meals and abstained from chocolate, coffee and alcohol.
Eventually, she would journey to pilgrimage centres as far as Portugal and Spain where she walked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela for several days.
She also visited the Holy Land and continued on to her final destination in southern India, the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health of Vailankanni.
Inevitably the question comes: What did you bring back from your pilgrimage and would you recommend that others try this?
“I would recommend it to anyone; people should never be afraid to step out … particularly young people, maybe in a gap year,” she said with typical enthusiasm.
She also came back with a growing sense of acceptance about her son’s death, but there was more.
As she says, “The Holy Spirit will always provide in the best possible way.”
About six months ago, visiting her parents in New Zealand’s North Island, Michael came to her in a dream.
“My son came to me to tell me, ‘Mum, please, I’m all right. I’m happy’,” she said.
“Since then, I haven’t been struck by such terrible guilt.
“I now feel Michael is in a good place and I feel close to him.
“I don’t stress or fret about him anymore.”
Heather’s final comment on her experiences these past years is instructive.
“What I’ve come to understand is that I’m still on my pilgrimage, with heaven as its destination,” she said.
