The family of Greek Australian SA Police pioneer Joanne Shanahan (nee Panayiotou) have reflected on her tragic passing five years on.
Joanne died on April 25, 2020, in a car accident that also claimed the life of another woman. Her husband Peter, suffered injuries in the crash.
At 55, she was one of the most prominent members of SA Police after 38 years in the force.
She was just the third woman to be appointed chief superintendent and had received an Australian Police Medal the previous year.
Their car was hit by a ute travelling 167km/h, driven by 20-year-old Harrison Kitt.
Kitt was found not guilty of two counts of causing death by dangerous driving because of mental incompetence.
Now in an interview with The Advertiser, the Shanahan family have spoken about forgiveness, their grief and the lessons to learn from a tragedy such as theirs.
They refuse to let negative emotions about Kitt dominate their lives.
Peter initially blocked Kitt from his mind but overtime he forgave him, hugging the young man’s parents after he was found not guilty.
“If I didn’t forgive him, then I’m carrying something around with me that he sort of owns of me, really… this awful feeling of displeasure,” Peter said.
“Whatever it is, I refuse to have it. I refuse to have that feeling.”
He’s adopted this mindset to overcome all the looking back and wondering what if.
What if Joanne was driving instead of him? What if they stopped for a two-minute convo before they left home that day? What if they dropped by Joanne’s parents on the way to their destination?
READ MORE: Joanne Shanahan, a tribute to a remarkable woman that left us too soon
He said it’s taken him a while to practice this mantra of “all we’ve got is now” and that there is nothing else you can do.
“All we have is now, right now. So contemplating what could have been, would have been, it’s a complete waste of time and emotional energy for me to be thinking about those things,” he said.
“Of course you think about it. Of course. But there’s no efficacy in it, other than to make yourself feel worse. And you’re making yourself feel worse, so you’ve got to concentrate on the now and be the best person you can be.
“I needed to be a person that would carry on the legacy of that amazing woman and those fantastic children that we have.”
One of them, Nick, now 29, he said he’s not sure he’ll ever forgive Kitt, but is conscious of avoiding falling into misery and anger.
“You get to the point when it’s like ‘jeez, am I really just gonna feel like this all the time? It sucks – there has to be something better than this’,” he said.
“It’s really hard to say something like this and it doesn’t sound trite, but Mum would not have wanted me just to be a miserable loser for the rest of my life, right? She would have wanted me to actually do something.
“For me, it was finding peace in the things that I can control… I wanted to make myself into somebody that mum would be proud of.
“And by doing that I focused on my own attitude and how I could make myself better and how I could treat the people around me in a way that if they died, or I died, there’s nothing really left on the table.”
There are still moments of intense grief and sorrow for the family but the frequency of these moments decline as time goes on.
Eleni, now 27, drives to Stirling each day to run a niche men’s clothing store, but it was months before she could bring herself to face the intersection where he mum died.
For two years she even changed her running route to avoid it. Now she runs past it but won’t stop there.
She’s more likely to throw caution to the wind and her message for anyone weighing up a big decision, is to do the same.
“If someone asks me for my opinion, I’m generally like, ‘well, bite the bullet – if it’s something you want to do, go ahead and do it because who knows what’s going to happen’,” she said.
“I definitely have not been great to my bank account sometimes now because I just think, ‘screw it, who knows what’s going to happen’.
“A lot of people think I’m older than I am because I am probably a little bit wiser than I used to be. I feel like I’ve just kind of become my own person a lot more now, I don’t really care about what other people think about me.”
Anzac Day, April 25, has continued to be tough for the family. Only Nick has been to some dawn services since his mother died.
But they make sure they are together and out of town on each anniversary of Joanne’s death.
For the first couple of years, Peter would have intense flashbacks at the exact time of the crash.
The day is becoming more manageable but and they have come to embrace the tradition of people laying flowers on the crash site.
“At first it made me really sad (when I saw those flowers) but this year I saw there were heaps of flowers there and it honestly just made me really happy,” Nick said.
“Because I know that there are so many people mum had helped and whose lives that she had touched that I would never know about and mum never told us about.
“But they still have that connection and for people to take the time out of their day to do something like that… that just makes me really happy, honestly. I feel really lucky.”
Joanne will forever be in her husband’s and children hearts, for they still think about her all the time.
Nick still wears the ring she gifted him on his 21st birthday. Eleni jokes that she honours her mum by decking herself out in lots of jewellery and doing “copious amounts of shopping”.
And they talk about her every day.
“She’s in our every conversation,” Peter said.
“She’s not off limits, and that’s a wonderful thing. She’s alive for as long as we talk about her and love her and think about her and she’s in our hearts.”
