Jess Loh
It’s not hard to talk with Jess Loh. She’s packed a lot of different lives into her short span of years, and she talks fluently about them all. But the deepest message she wants to pass on is one better shared in silence.
Jess was born in Canberra and lived there for the first three years of her life before moving to Kuala Lumpur with her parents and four siblings. Her parents were both musicians, and some of her fondest memories of the time are of being up on stage dancing with her siblings. In KL she enjoyed time with her tight-knit extended family, and her time in the international school where she and all her siblings studied.
In her teens, the family moved back to Australia. Arriving in Sydney, Jess found herself in an agricultural school – something very far away from her experiences to date – but rolled with the differences. Change has been a constant theme of her life, and her ability to find the best in new situations has been put to the test more than once.
After high school, Jess completed an Advanced Diploma of Property Valuation, and spent the next ten years working in various roles within the real estate industry, including property management. She loved working with people and the genuine relationships she built, but gave it away after moving into sales and feeling the deeply superficial nature of things on that side of the fence.
What next? By then she’d met and fallen in love with Aaron Vidal. Aaron began studying to become a NSW Police Officer while Jess dived into her next challenge – training to be an electrician. Six months into training she was top of her class, holding her own in a very male-dominated industry, when the double blow of a family tragedy and a medical emergency meant she had to withdraw from her apprenticeship.
“Sometimes we just don’t know why things happen the way they do, but sometimes they happen to put you on a different path, you know?” Jess and Aaron were planning their future when Jess decided to pursue a career in the Air Force. She excelled in the initial training and testing, becoming one of the few female candidates to make it through. In the same week she received her acceptance into the Air Force, she discovered that she was pregnant—a cherished moment for them both. Tragically, soon after this news, Aaron was killed in a traffic collision. “And from that point on, it all just felt pretty numb.”
NSW Police Legacy stepped in, offering counselling services, contact with other Legatees, and most importantly, somebody to listen without judgement. “It was the help I didn’t know I needed at the time.” When she was first contacted, she was offered a “New Legatee” pack, which included a stack of information she just wasn’t ready for. She appreciated it later, though, once she’d had time to sit with herself and process some of her grief.
It was this appreciation for the non-intrusive but constant support that she received that led her, three years later, to want to give back to the people who are going through their own grief journey. As part of her own healing process, she started making candles. She found the slow handcrafting therapeutic, was drawn to the soothing warmth of the candle flame, and found comfort in the metaphor of sparking light.
Her therapy quickly became much more than that, and she now runs the small business Etzio & Co, handcrafting candles with the enthusiastic help of her three-and-a-half-year-old son Etzio. Every new Legatee that comes into Police Legacy’s care now receives one of these candles, and Jess hopes it will be something that new Legatees will come to appreciate, in their own time, and in their own way.
“Sometimes all you want is that moment of lighting a candle and just being with that.”
