The 20-year-old Irwin joined the Mental As Anyone podcast and spoke about losing his dad, Steve Irwin, when he was just three years old.
“It (the pain) never goes away. It doesn’t matter what age you are; I know people who never even met their dad, and that is incredibly painful,” Irwin said.
“I know people who recently lost parental figures, they had a brilliant, long, wonderful life and passed away peacefully, and that is so bloody hard, it doesn’t matter.”
Irwin said he’s had to accept the fact that “you don’t ever really go wake up one day and go, ‘OK, all right, I’ve moved on, I’m good’.”
“It’s just not it; you will never move on. But it’s this shadow that you’ve always got that eventually, instead of it just being within you consuming every day, it walks beside you, that sort of thing,” he said.
Irwin said he finds peace in loving at Australia Zoo; his dad’s life work.
“And living in Australia Zoo, you walk around … he’s everywhere. The images and the pictures and the video and the sound, he’s still part of every day for me,” Irwin said.
And personally, in my grief journey … I love that.
“And having lost someone at a very young age, I love getting little pieces of him back. It is easy to feel as though time passes and every passing year you’re further from someone, but you have to think every passing year I hear a new story or I see a new picture of me and dad.”
