Suddenly losing a partner is a nightmare, and when young children are involved, it’s especially sad.
Add to that the complications of being a same-sex couple in a country where the law doesn’t recognise you as legally married.
Sydney woman Lara Ryan has spoken out in support of same sex marriage after her wife of ten years, Elise, was killed in a pedestrian accident last month.
Elise was struck by a car after dropping their four-year-old daughter, Ivy, to the local daycare centre.
Even more tragically, the accident occurred just three weeks after Elise had given birth to the couple’s second daughter, Skylar.
Photo: Lara Ryan (Elise on left)
Devastated Lara has told Essential Baby Australia, that the community have rallied around her as she now brings up her four-year-old daughter, and one-month-old baby girl, without her beloved partner.
“Women have turned up with donated breast milk for Skylar, I have two freezers full of donated milk. One delivery even turned up from Newcastle, where Elise grew up. It’s incredible how generous people have been.”
However, her experiences in fighting to be recognised as Elise’s wife in the aftermath of the incident have made things so much more difficult.
In a moving Facebook post, her wife Lara describes the frustrations she experienced as the bereaved half of a marriage that is not legally ‘acceptable’ – and how her grief was compounded because of it.
Same sex unions are treated as de-facto unions under federal law in Australia despite a significant number of attempts to amend the Marriage Act to legalise same-sex marriage.
This is why.Because having lost my partner in a horrible pedestrian accident this month I had to ask policemen if I was…
Posted by Lara Ryan on Sunday, February 28, 2016
Lara and her two beautiful girls, Ivy and Skylar
Here is the full text which has now been shared over 60k times on Facebook;
This is why.
Because having lost my partner in a horrible pedestrian accident this month I had to ask policemen if I was ‘allowed’ to write Spouse on incident reports.
I had to cross out boxes for husband on the death certificate and boxes for father on our new baby’s birth certificate (both on the same day).
I had to yell out in a busy, crazy emergency room “She is my wife, I know it’s not legal but she is my wife!”
Because we were never political, we just did our thing, did our life our way and tried to live by example to shift peoples hearts rather than pushing agendas. BUT the amount of freaking paper work I am having to do to secure mine and my children’s future welfare is just ridiculous when all it would take is one marriage certificate.
And most of all because I love her, and she has been my every day for ten years, She is the mother of our two girls, she is the future I dreamed of and she is my safe place to land.
Because love is love and we should celebrate it and encourage it always.
The world is harsh enough.
Feel free to share widely – #thisiswhy
In light of Ireland’s recent win for Marriage Equality, I think we can safely say that the majority of the population would hope for change in Australian law too.
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