When her boyfriend Nathan Brown died suddenly, Haylee Penfold, then 19, couldn't find anyone to relate to.
"When my friends tried to talk to me about it they could only relate it to a breakup, but there's no comparing," she says.
"My person was gone forever.
"I really clung onto Nathan's friends and family."
Like many young people, Haylee, now 24, turned to social media for support.
"I tried to join all these Facebook groups and they were all widows … I felt weird joining that because we weren't married," she says.
"I was seeing all these posts about people that have been together for like 40 years.
"Mine and Nathan's relationship wasn't really anything compared to this. It kind of felt like it just wasn't enough."
Nathan was 19 when he came down with a bad case of influenza in 2017.
"One of his lungs was pretty much full of fluid and they told him he had pneumonia," Haylee says.
"I remember the attitude of the nurses and the doctors … [they] were telling me 'he's young, he's going to be fine'."
Nathan was put into a coma to help him fight the infection.
"Then they started saying things like 'if he makes it out, he's going to need a lot of rehab' and things like that," Haylee says.
But Nathan never woke up.
The shock of his death left Haylee stumped with how to react to her grief.
"I kind of just pushed it aside," she says.
"Nathan's mum used to say to me 'it's OK to lose your sh** sometimes'."
Processing young grief
Jennifer Perino is a clinical counsellor with the National Association of Loss and Grief and says the experience of young people who lose a romantic partner is tough because it's not common.
Jennifer says the grief a young person feels if they lose a partner is just as valid as other losses, yet it is often dismissed.
"[There is] a societal expectation that you're only young, and it's only young love, so you're not really attached to them," she says.
"But a lot of people forget what it was like when we were that age and how deeply we loved and how deeply we connected."
The pressure to eventually move on can be put on people of all ages, Jennifer says.
"There's a societal expectation that you have to tough it out and you have to just keep it inside and carry on: 'Pull up your socks and get on with it,'" she says.
"That's not the way the grief works."
For Haylee, sharing the story of her lost love has been helpful.
"I see people come up on my TikTok in a similar situation," she says.
"It takes a lot to share your own story, but it's going to help other people feel less alone at the end of the day.
"I think it's worth the scariness of sharing your own story."
Finding another love
Haylee hasn't moved on from Nathan but has found love with her fiance Kye, who she's known since childhood.
She said Nathan set a high standard for her future partners by "how good he was" and "how well he treated me".
"I wasn't going to accept anything less than that," she says.
Kye is extremely understanding, Haylee says, and fits into her life perfectly – including the parts of her life that still include Nathan.
"Nathan's parents love him," Haylee says.
"He would come to dinner at their house and play with Nathan's nieces and nephews and stuff. He just kind of fits into the picture."
More than five years on from Nathan's death, how does Haylee feel?
"I'm more grateful that I got that time with him," she says.
"As much as it didn't last as long as I wish it did, I can still look back and I can see and think about the memories that made me laugh and made me love him."
