Denis Glennon freely concedes fortune smiled on him and his family in the early 1990s.
The managing director of a thriving engineering business, Mr Glennon was well respected on Perth's St George's Terrace, the city's central commerce hub.
He lived in a beautiful home in the riverside suburb of Mosman Park, had been happily married to Una for more than 25 years and had two loving daughters, Ciara and Denise.
But in 1997, his world abruptly came crashing down, leaving him "confronted by grief with no shield or denial or indeed, hope," as he starkly puts it.
That cataclysmic event was the discovery of the body of his beloved eldest daughter Ciara in bushland north of Perth, 19 days after she vanished from the streets of Claremont.
Ciara, aged 27, had been brutally murdered.
It would take a further 19 years for her murderer to be arrested, and almost four more years for the Glennon family to finally achieve some justice when, in 2020, Bradley Robert Edwards was found guilty of killing Ciara and 23-year-old Jane Rimmer, after the state's longest-ever criminal trial.
An insight into the abyss
Now, 26 years on from the unfathomable loss of Ciara, Mr Glennon has written a book detailing his experiences of grief, and how he ultimately came to find a sense of contentment after enduring the worst of times.
Pastures of Healing is an unflinching look into the abyss that opened in Mr Glennon's life upon Ciara's death.
It's the sort of book he wishes was available to him as he embarked on a desperate and initially unfulfilling search for understanding and a way forward, particularly as he wrestled with his raw emotions in the early weeks and months.
"When this type of grief hits you, the first thing you notice is an absence of a will to push on, absolute lethargy, continual exhaustion, resulting from just total lack of sleep," he says.
The physical side was just one manifestation of Mr Glennon's inner turmoil.
"You're hit with heartbrokenness, sadness, loneliness, and an absolute, desolate sense of absence," he says.
"You have lost the whole sense of control of your life, and for a man that is tough."
And as a Catholic, the spiritual side of his life was completely up-ended too.
"I flung some of my strongest anger towards God," he says candidly.
"You told us You were a good God.
"Why do You let such awful things happen to good people?
"What is it that we did or didn't do that allowed this to happen to us."
He was also consumed by anger, "the likes of which I had not known I owned," he writes in the book.
"I felt angry towards the murderer, the police and the local council, who (in my view) had not done enough to address safety and security issues in Claremont following the earlier disappearances of two other women in similar circumstances."
Put simply, "the loss of Ciara was more than I could bear".
A search for understanding
A thoughtful man, Mr Glennon comes across as a rationalist, someone with a deep need to understand the world and events around him.
Mr Glennon's professional life was spent immersed in precision and logic, seeking and finding solutions to engineering problems.
So when Ciara was murdered, Mr Glennon instinctively found himself searching for explanations.
"You search for help to understand how this could happen to us, why such evil is allowed to happen, why some man-monster could do what he did to Ciara," he says.
But explaining the inexplicable was always destined to be a fruitless task, and the literature he found on grief and grieving proved to be of little help.
Despite ploughing through an estimated 70 to 80 books and scholarly articles on grief, he says they "really didn't help" him at all.
"There were just no answers there," he says.
Mr Glennon found the widely accepted models describing five or seven stages of grief simply bore little relation to his own suffering, which was not neatly divided into "defined stages", nor was there any linear order to it.
"A true meaning of grief cannot be discovered in academic theory, or cold analyses, or in the writings of others," he writes in Pastures of Healing.
"The best answers were inside myself."
Epiphany on a boat
Struggling to get out of bed, go to work or "withstand the onslaught of the continuous waves of grief", Mr Glennon would retreat to the sanctuary of his yacht in the weeks and months following Ciara's murder, moored at Fremantle Sailing Club.
"There, alone in the aft cabin, I would cry uncontrollably for hours, trying to make sense of the change in our lives and the loss of Ciara," he writes.
"Many times I thought I would not come out of it at all, and that I was on a downward slippery slope to God knows where.
"I had collapsed into sorrow."
It was on board the Calypso V the devastated father experienced a revelation that was to prove pivotal in finding a way forward.
He began to think of his father and grandfather, both strong yet humble Irish men whose core values were founded on a sense of responsibility, especially to family.
They "headed their families by cultivating an unspoken, quiet nurturing atmosphere of family cohesion, friendship, manners, fairness, truthfulness, decency, an honourable work ethic, competitive sportsmanship, a respect for others and a spiritual base in their respective homes.
"These values, passed to me, were the same as had been handed to them.
"And I knew then that I would have those values, indeed, those strengths, buried deep in me, if I could find them," he says.
"So almost spontaneously, I felt as if I was receiving help from them, to get off my knees, stand up, be strong, do what you're supposed to do, guide your family through this."
Determined to "lead my family out of what had happened to us" Mr Glennon describes "drawing on the embedded strength of the wordless learning of my childhood" that gave him new courage, mental toughness and wisdom.
A father's promise
Armed with this new found strength, courage and a sense of purpose, Mr Glennon visited Ciara's grave the following day.
"I made that promise to her: I was going to find — or I was going to die trying — the person or persons who murdered you, Ciara," he says.
It was a promise the determined father was finally able to fulfil on September 24, 2020, when Edwards was convicted of Ciara's murder,.
His conviction was thanks in large part to Ciara herself and her courageous struggle as the heavily built Edwards overpowered her.
The diminutive lawyer scratched her attacker, leaving an almost unimaginably tiny fragment of his DNA lodged under her fingernail.
That DNA was to prove critical in the murder trial.
Mr Glennon's path to healing saw him reject other conventional wisdom about grief as well, including the idea that forgiveness is necessary to move forward with life, advice that he was repeatedly given.
"I will never forgive him [Edwards] for what he did to Ciara," Mr Glennon says.
"Have I forgotten or will I ever forget the horrendous fatal wounds inflicted by him on Ciara? No.
"If I forgive the murderer, it brings a form of legitimacy to his evil act and attempts to assuage the horror of Ciara's death.
"Her murder was and always will be terrible.
"I find the arguments for forgiveness unnecessary, indeed offensive."
Trial dredges up trauma
Edwards' trial was to prove a testing time for Mr Glennon.
At a time when he felt he had made significant progress in his acceptance of grief, he was again taken back to a place where he felt a loss of control.
"I had put in the work, to try and come to terms with what happened to me, I had found insights, I had found pathways to healing," he says.
"My grief had ameliorated and diminished, but wasn't gone — and I was quite comfortable with that.
"But then the trial — would I be thrown right back? To the beginning of all this, again, would some kind of post traumatic stress rear its ugly head?"
It was a struggle to compose himself enough to set foot in the courtroom most days of the extraordinarily long trial, which took place over seven long months and often seemed to move "at glacial pace".
"There were so many mornings, that I found it just as hard as in the first year after Ciara was murdered, to get out of bed, get into my suit and tie and go to the trial.
"And there were many mornings when I was tempted not to go, feeling 'this is just too much. You don't need it'."
Ultimately, however, the work Mr Glennon had put in over the previous two decades in coming to terms with what had happened to Ciara, and the inner strength that he had cultivated, was to stand him in good stead in helping him endure the trial, which aired horrific details of Ciara's last moments.
And finally, when the guilty verdict was delivered, came relief.
Closure 'doesn't exist'
But ask Mr Glennon about the concept of "closure," and he instinctively bristles, labelling it an "attractive idea put forward by those who have never known grief".
"People think of closure, as in this case, that they have found the perpetrator," he says.
"He's been tried, he's been sentenced, he's in jail, he's never going to get out.
"Now you need to get on with life and get back to normal.
"But there is no golden return to my life with Ciara. It just can't happen. I can't have her back. It's as simple as that."
Another idea Mr Glennon wholeheartedly rejects is the suggestion that grief brings families together, at least in his personal experience.
He has found grief to be a singularly lonely experience, even within the sanctuary of a loving, long-term marriage.
The way he describes it, a void opened up in his life, in Una's life, and in between them, something he believes may be similar for other grieving parents.
'[Parents are] not only dealing with their own grief, but they are witnessing what their husband or wife is going through at a time when each of them is at their lowest ebb to provide any help to the other," he says.
Each of them had to work through grief at their own pace, which sometimes meant when one of them wanted to talk about Ciara, the other did not.
The whole experience, he writes, "tested our marriage like nothing else."
Statistics Mr Glennon discovered in his search for answers suggested 35 per cent of marriages did not survive the loss of a child, but he was determined to ensure his did.
"We allowed each other to grieve in our own way, in our own space, at our own pace; doing the best we could to honour each other's way of grieving; striving not to be critical of the other," he writes in Pastures of Healing.
Una published her own book in 2010, Ciara's Gift, which detailed her journey with grief, revealing for the first time to her husband the extent and depth of her suffering.
"This helped greatly," he wrote.
'Embracing the grief is learning to live with it'
If his rejection of forgiveness and closure, and his experience of grief as a largely lonely affair gives the impression of a man mired in woundedness, suffering and sorrow — nothing could be further from the truth.
Denis Glennon in 2023 is a man who has found a new sense of peace and contentment.
In his book, he likens this process to the Japanese art of kintsugi, where pieces of broken pottery are glued back together using powdered gold to accentuate the fault lines.
"The kintsugi approach celebrates each piece's unique history, emphasising its fractures, cracks and brokenness, instead of hiding, disguising or spurning them.
"Kintsugi embraces the faults, the impacts of damage.
"Embracing grief is learning to live with it, not being afraid to show it or see it for what it is, instead acknowledging it as a part of my cracked self, and doing this with the most with gracious dignity I can muster."
Mr Glennon has come to an acceptance that he'll never find an answer to the question that plagued him for so long — why was Ciara murdered?
But that's okay.
"I am accommodating my grief; it is an integrated part of me," he says.
"I have been able to step beyond the assaults of grief and experience a joy in life that is entirely new to me.
'I am at peace with the circumstances in which I find myself.
"Ciara would expect no different from me."
