About - Without Your Light

My name is Sharon Gourlay and my gorgeous daughter, Soraya, died by suicide in Feb 2025 at just 14 years old.

Sharon Gourlay and Soraya — With my daughter, Soraya, on a jet ski tour in Langkawi. This was two months before she died.

To say this has rocked my life and that of my family is an understatement.

I have two younger sons that are 9 and 13 years old. We are all suffering. Soraya was the centre of our family and lives. It’s so hard to make sense of her preventable death and to understand why this happened to our gorgeous ginger ninja.

I have been a professional blogger for 11 years. I am used to starting blogs about anything I’m remotely interested in, but I have hesitated with this topic.

There are many reasons.

The biggest is because I don’t want to hurt anyone in my situation more than they are hurting. I also don’t want to hurt my sons.

I want to make it super clear that I am not qualified at all in mental health.

I am not writing this to tell you how to grieve, how to handle mental health or anything else related to that. I write this because I know that reading about other people’s similar experiences sometimes helps. I hope I can help.

I also strongly want every parent who has dealt with the mental health system to understand how they betrayed us to hopefully save your child. I want every parent of a child under 18 to realise that mental health professionals aren’t transparent and honest. Just knowing that would have made me act differently and may haved saved our daughter.

I hope this site will help us advocate for change in both the mental health and education systems. They both failed my daughter so badly.

Soraya loved kids. She wanted to be a mental health pediatric nurse working at the Royal Children’s Hospital saving kids like her. So I know she would want me to do this. This is the only way she can help kids like her now.

But it’s hard to be so open and raw.

I have two living sons and I want to respect their privacy and not alarm them. I’ve asked their permission to blog about this and made them promise not to read this without me, but I am also conscious that I can’t control that. Or that kids they know may read this and make fun of them. It’s so impossibly hard to be a young person at this time.

Then, there’s my mum and everyone else. I know people who love me don’t want me to hurt and seeing it in black and white may hurt.

Back in 2014, I started my blog, Digital Nomad Wannabe, to chart my journey from starting an online business as a stay-at-home-mum to making it successful. It was mainly for me but touched many. I hope this can do that too, even with this incredibly difficult subject matter.

The logo for this site comes from me calling my daughter my “Soraya Bear” when she was a newborn. This was because I cuddled her in bed like a teddy bear. Over time, my name for her was “Bear Bear”. She was my teddy bear, my comfort in life.

I made it red because I will always associate red with her gorgeous, bright red hair.

My life will never be the same. At this point, I don’t imagine it will ever be remotely good. Maybe we can prove me wrong together.

If you are on this journey too, I’m so sorry. Our kids (and us) did not deserve this. I hope we can find some colour in the grey, some hope in the despair.

You can also find me here: