How a tragic loss motivated a teenage Olivia Hahn to find her voice — and speak out for other young people, too.
By David Lennam | Photo by Jeffrey Bosdet
Olivia Hahn was just 14 when she found out her mother had only two months to live.
It was 2022, and Patricia Kilshaw had a cancer she wasn’t going to survive. So Hahn became determined to live those fleeting moments for her mom.
“I didn’t really focus on it too much because I thought, well, there she is, she’s right here,” she says. “And every time I thought, ‘She’s not going to be there in two months, I’m going to go and hug her.’ In those two months I just wanted to make everything I could for her.”
Small meaningful gestures. Cleaning the kitchen every day or bringing her home her favourite doughnut from Tim Hortons. “Little things that would make her smile. Every single thing I did I wanted to give her some joy.”
There was always some hope in the back of Hahn’s mind that everything was going to be all right. The waiting “was harder than having an actual death,” she says. “In the moment, it feels like that’s still a lot of time, but how do you even make sense of that? You’re going to keep living your whole life and they’re not.”
And when the end came, unaware of how to cope with a massive emotional blow, Hahn felt lost, like so many of us unfamiliar with grieving. Searching the library for books offering some help, some solace, she was perplexed. All she could find were volumes written by adults, not people her age, looking back on some early grief from the distance of time.
Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — didn’t line up for Hahn. They arrived out of order.
“I was like, ‘Why is mine all messy and jumbled?’ I can feel this one second and this another second. It was more like a roller-coaster,” she says. “I figured there must be another 14-year-old girl somewhere in the world who has lost her mom and she’s doing the same thing I am, looking for help and she can’t find anything.”
It seemed perfectly natural for her to write her own book. And in 2023, still a student at Reynolds Secondary School, she self-published Healing Our Wounded Hearts: A Real Life Story About Loss in the Voice of a Teenager, written for teens, in the voice of a teen as a journey through mourning.
Changing the Tune
Hahn, now 18 and a Reynolds grad, looks back on that book, and two more she wrote along the same emotional tangent, and admits she has moved on. Or, at least, forward.
“What I want to do,” she says, “is music.”
Hahn released her first song in March across all the streaming services. Lust Over Love has nothing to do with grief, the loss of her mother or those books. None of that.
According to Hahn, Lust Over Love explores the superficiality of our society from a female perspective. She says women like her are judged on how they look, presumptions are made and there’s very little of trying to have a deeper relationship beyond the immediate and physical. The song tries to empower those who have had their self-worth shattered, or at least put to the test.
A post on Hahn’s Instagram explained it. “If you’ve been lusted over, it feels like you’re nothing. It feels like you’re being objectified and the person’s only intention is that they want your attraction.”
The title’s a bit daring, but comes from experiences Hahn had modelling for local fundraisers. She was — how can we put this — approached by men whose intentions were not virtuous.
Hahn wrote it to be an anthem for women, but calls it gender fluid.
“Even men get played by women, too. I wanted to come across with a real story that was relatable and inspiring and from a real place.”
That’s where local producer Wynn Gogol came in to coax a blossoming voice and provide some shrewd advice.
“There needs to be more storytelling in your voice,” Gogol told her.
Hahn says on their first meeting she presented her lyrics and told him she wanted to record a song.
“And he’s like, ‘Mmmm, your voice isn’t there yet. We have to do a lot of work to get there.’ I’m glad he told me that. I wouldn’t just want to create something that was not the potential it could have been because I was impatient.”
Asked if she felt compelled to write the song, as she had with her books, Hahn says both sprang from the same intention: to reach out to others feeling the same way she was.
“And I feel like life’s short and if you don’t try everything … I could see myself as an 80-year-old going, ‘Oh, I wanted to write a song, but I never did.’ That’s what made me do it.”
Life Lessons
Perhaps this experimentation with music is, ultimately, how Hahn processes the death of her mother — by using what she left behind for her daughter: wisdom, truths, advice and love. And a get-it-done energy. A bit of the old carpe diem.
“If she didn’t pass away when I was young, I probably wouldn’t be like this,” says Hahn. “It pushes me to do everything. I have big ambitions.”
Considering herself something of a deep thinker and a dreamer, Hahn is moving on from heartache, “taking the grief out from underneath her bed” as she wrote in her book, with the understanding that her mother’s energy lives on in her.
“In 14 years of my life we had a bond that some people don’t have in a lifetime with their mom,” she says. “She gave me so many lessons of life that are impactful that I can carry through my whole life. It’s so rare … Now I think it kind of shapes who I am now. I remember my mom always telling me she wanted me to find joy again and not stay in the grief.”
