Connecting Seniors
A Journey through Generational Trauma to Advocate for Mental Health with with Walter Frankel
Walter Frankel
Walter Frankel chose his values over his marriage and found purpose serving isolated older Australians.
Kintsugi Studio
Connecting Seniors
Walter Frankel
Walter Frankel chose his values over his marriage and found purpose serving isolated older Australians.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Walter Frankel is the son of Holocaust survivors, born in Rhodesia and raised across continents. At twelve, he saw a photograph of Australia and knew it was where he belonged. He spent years finding his way there, arriving in Brisbane in 1984. For nearly five decades, Walter stayed silent about the dysfunction in his marriage and family, choosing peace over safety. At 48 years in, he left. The cost of that silence nearly broke him.
During COVID lockdown, Walter listened to his mother's testimony as a Holocaust survivor for the first time. He heard in her words the same nightmares that had haunted his own childhood. He realized then that generational trauma is real, inherited through silence and carried in the body. When he retired, the weight of everything he had absorbed caught up with him. He was hospitalized and forced to see what decades of work had obscured: that he had lost his family, and that staying alive meant something entirely different now.
Today, Walter runs a conversation program for isolated older Australians at Wesley Mission called "Discussing the Elephant in the Room." He does not charge for this work. He listens first, empathizes without pity, and helps people write their lives down so they can see themselves clearly again. He walks alongside people who fear death, abandonment, or being judged, asking nothing but respect in return. Walter says service is what keeps him alive now. Without the chance to stand with others, to use his lived experience for their benefit, he has nothing he would want to live for.
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