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<\/p>\nA few years ago, screenwriter Robyn Butler asked herself a difficult question: What would my life look like if my husband died?<\/p>\n
“I thought I would cling to my kids,” she says.<\/p>\n
“When you love someone deeply, you have that feeling every now and again. It makes you realise how much they mean to you.”<\/p>\n
Soon she began to wonder what that life would look like if she didn’t have kids. Would it help to donate her husband’s organs?<\/p>\n
“If I had donated his heart, would that give me comfort knowing that that existed, living, breathing somewhere?” she says.<\/p>\n
It sparked the idea for her latest TV show, Dear Life, co-created with her husband and creative partner, Wayne Hope.<\/p>\n
It’s the story of 40-something Lillian (Brooke Satchwell; The Twelve), who, reeling from the sudden death of her doctor fiance, Ash, starts to track down and make connections with the recipients of his organs.<\/p>\n
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Hope and Butler hope to explore more about Lillian \u2014 and the idea of finding yourself in your 40s \u2014 if Dear Life gets renewed. (Supplied: Stan\/Jane Zhang)<\/p>\n
That’s not something you’re supposed to do. Letters from recipients to donor families are anonymised to protect everyone’s privacy.<\/p>\n
But in Lillian’s case, it was almost too easy to figure out who had written her a letter expressing their gratitude for Ash’s heart \u2014 only one person had a heart transplant in Melbourne at that time.<\/p>\n
Organ donors desperately needed<\/a><\/p>\n Last year saw an increase in the number of organ donors, but as donors age and families refuse permission, fewer Australians are receiving life-saving donations.<\/p>\n Hope suggests there is something “cathartic” in the idea of donating your partner’s organs \u2014 a feeling of connection that can break a person out of the insularity of grief.<\/p>\n “That notion of something living on is a practical way of grieving,” he says. “There’s some life to it. There’s some sense to loss.”<\/p>\n For Butler and Hope, the idea had all the ingredients of great drama.<\/p>\n “When you write drama, you always try to write about life and death,” Butler says. “They’re the big stakes.<\/p>\n “This is literally life and death. Someone has to die so someone else can live.”<\/p>\n Relating to her character<\/p>\n During the pandemic, Satchwell spoke with her partner about organ donation \u2014 something she’d always supported intellectually, but had never looked into.<\/p>\n It was knowing that she had found her life partner that made her feel comfortable to finally sign up to be an organ donor<\/a>.<\/p>\n “The profound effect that it can have on not just the recipient, but the people that love and care for them and the community that they’re part of, to me, that just made sense,” she says.<\/p>\n But what spoke to her about the character of Lillian wasn’t her approach to organ donation. It was how much she reminded her of past versions of herself.<\/p>\n In Dear Life, Lillian copes with her grief by drinking excessively, her perpetual hangover jeopardising her job at Ballarat “living museum” Sovereign Hill and her friendship with best friend and Ash’s co-worker, Mary (English actor Eleanor Matsuura; The Day of the Jackal).<\/p>\n Eleanor Matsuura plays Mary, one of Lillian’s friends, who was with Ash at work on the night he died. (Supplied: Stan\/Jane Zhang)<\/p>\n “Every morning, with the concrete boots of grief, she is just waking up trying to breathe her way through each day,” Satchwell says.<\/p>\n “And you’ve got all these external elements that are just perpetually placing obstacles in her way as she tries to heal and find a way to walk through the world without her anchor.”<\/p>\n Playing Lillian brought to mind moments when she has felt like a “human pinball machine”, like when she was in her mid-20s in a supermarket in regional Victoria, holding a very bleak shopping list: three bags of kitty litter, three blocks of chocolate, and three pouches of tobacco.<\/p>\n After 30 years on screen, Satchwell still recalls how she felt starting out on Neighbours as a teenager: “I didn’t really know what I was getting into or who I was at that point.” (Supplied: Stan\/Jane Zhang)<\/p>\n “I had a car full of my life belongings and animals,” she says.<\/p>\n “It’s those little moments in life that just make me giggle. I love that being a human is so absurd, really.\u00a0<\/p>\n “It’s all things magnificent, all things chaotic, all at once.”<\/p>\n From comedy to drama<\/p>\n Dear Life is Hope and Butler’s first TV drama, after making their careers with comedies like ABC TV’s Upper Middle Bogan<\/a>, Summer Love<\/a> and The Librarians<\/a>.<\/p>\n Watch Summer Love on ABC iview<\/a><\/p>\n Hope says it was delightful \u2014 albeit disconcerting at first \u2014 not to have to think about “landing a joke every few sentences”.<\/p>\n To write Dear Life, the couple met with people from the transplant community to hear their stories \u2014 from medical practitioners to donor families to people working with DonateLife<\/a>, a government program to increase organ and tissue donation.<\/p>\n They had a range of responses to organ donation, from thinking it’s the “right thing to do” but not wanting to hear from the recipients to donor families who longed for letters \u2014 like Lillian does.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/79a84356f5070ac55ab7aecbd676e931.jpeg\")
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