“I have been told that it was her time”: Chris Ferguson on losing her daughter

She is gone, my daughter, and I am lost. I look for her in the birds, in the wind and rain, in the early morning sunrays.

Sometimes I find her in my dreams. Sometimes I wake crying. Often, I don’t believe it is real: this daughter death. How can it be?

My beautiful and talented daughter, Matilda, was killed in a workplace accident on February 1, 2024. There were no goodbyes, although the last words we spoke to each other were “I love you”. The last words I texted were “A pinch and a punch for the first of the month.”

And she was gone.

Matilda had started her own company managing remote stations for absentee owners, carbon speculators and natural capital investors. She was managing country that was simply, to her, home.

On a burning hot February morning, on a station between Tibooburra and Wanaaring in far north-western New South Wales, she fell from her bike in circumstances I don’t understand and she died instantly. Nothing would have saved her. It was a complete and utter full stop.

I have been told that it was her time, but that is something that I cannot understand. There was so much more that she wanted to do. We had big plans.

My life has been a life of building. Outrageous ambitions have been the powerhouse of my life, a first-generation farmer building a home for my children and the ones that come after. I drove us forward with my sights set firmly on the far horizon. 

It has been a slog and we were so close. We were so close.

Now here I am, tentatively holding on with aching fingertips to the life that we built. I long to let it go, to let it drift off in a hot westerly and leave me standing here on this empire of dirt with no dreams left in me, living in the dull gloaming of now with no light on the horizon to draw me forward.

I flounder.

I go through the motions — bulls in, bulls out, calves marked, cows pregnancy tested, weaning, bulls in — because I don’t know what else to do and because it all doesn’t just stop because I want it to.

It doesn’t stop simply because there is no reason to go on. The accumulated energy that has been invested in building all of this over both of our lifetimes propels life forward, dragging me with it.

The rest of the time I dig in the dirt making a garden and watch the birds for signs from my daughter. I sit quietly and sip my morning coffee with my gaze sliding over the landscape. A pot of tea still bookends my day. My partner, the Ginja Ninja, shares Tim Tams with me and smiles. These small things are about all my brain can handle.

I miss her laughter, her giggle, her serious conversations.

I miss the idea of her.

I miss her.

My daughter has gone and flown off with the birds while I am held to the Earth with leaden feet and emu wings.

Now and then I catch a glimpse of the bittersweet, the knowledge that in grief I experience the entirety of my love for her.

I remember saying to my brothers in the aftermath, “You think you know how much you love your kids, but you don’t. You love them more! You love them more!”

Matilda Ferguson’s legacy continues with a scholarship fund established in her name by the Australian Rural Leadership Foundation. Read Claire Delahunty’s article about Matilda’s work and the scholarship fund here.

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In a peculiar way I am grateful for the opportunity to experience the fullness of the love we share, even though it overwhelms, even though it has laid me flat before it and taken the very air from my lungs.

There is no other way that I could have understood the enormity of my love for her, and it is a beautiful thing. Heartachingly beautiful.

Matilda was a quiet achiever. She always showed up and did her best in whatever was before her. When mustering she was always in the right spot because she paid attention to the detail. In our family she was there when she was needed because it was important to her that she be the best sister and daughter she could be. She would go the extra mile in her friendships because she wanted to be a good friend, someone who could be relied upon to show up. I’m making her sound perfect and of course she wasn’t, but she put real effort into the things that mattered to her. She really did her best and made us all proud to be part of her life.

In my life before, when I was an innocent, I had never really thought about what happens to us when we die. Now, in the after, I read every book and scour through podcasts and documentaries, searching for my daughter. And she goes on, of that I am in no doubt. Our relationship has not ended with her passing, it has changed. She is as close to me as my breath.

I ask her for rain for the west and she sends the floods. I ask her for help with a rogue cow and the cow blinks her cow eyes and turns and walks where I need her to go. I ask her for a sign and a bird sits before me and looks me square in the eye, or an eagle lands on the road before me or flies low through my garden. When my heart is raw and aching a breath of wind will drape itself gently over my shoulders, caressing my face.

In the dark hours of the night when I’m sobbing and broken, a warm weight will enter my heart and flow gently to my toes. I know it’s her as well as if I could see her.

I look to the sun each morning and whisper, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

I speak to a medium and he tells me that she is saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

I ask her for a song to prove to me that it really is her that I feel. I press play and hear Harry Styles sing a song I don’t know, a song called ‘Matilda’.

Matilda my darling. 

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