"I felt my feet lift off the floor, and I can't explain the sensation of my head and my heart meeting and bouncing back and forward off one another," she said.

"I could hear [the police officer] talking to me in the background, but I couldn't hear what he was saying.

"And it's true when they say, 'Sit down before you hear this news'... because my legs just stopped working, and my knees buckled, and I just fell to my knees."

Jenny's brother, Bernard Sessions, had taken his own life on June 1, 2017. He was aged 45.

"All I could think of, 'It's my fault', because we'd had an argument a few days before," Jenny said. And that feeling was only compounded by the awful sense of finality.

"It was the first time I'd felt, 'Things are really, really bad, and there's nothing I can do to change it, because he's gone'."

In the hours after learning her brother had died, Jenny went to Bernie's unit at Mayfield. It was immaculate. Underneath a lamp was a note that Bernie had left. Reading that note provided his little sister with a sense of relief that it wasn't her fault.

"Bernard just was very unwell," she said. "He had a profound mental illness."

For many years, Bernie Sessions had been living with paranoid schizophrenia, which had progressively isolated him.

However, many people knew Jenny's brother, even if they didn't know his name. He was "The Man in the Doorway". Day and night, he sat on a blue milk crate outside his unit by Maitland Road, waving at passersby.

Jenny lamented her brother had led such a sad and lonely life. Yet that perception was "completely flipped" when she posted on social media that Bernie had died.

There was a swell of shock and sadness, as the community responded first online then out on the street, creating a shrine of sorts where Bernie once sat.

People looked for ways to express how they felt about losing The Man in the Doorway.

"What's the word everyone's using around this pandemic? 'Unprecedented'," said Jenny.

"It's like this unprecedented thing, where you lose your brother to suicide, yet a community that you don't even know exists paints a mural for him, does a play, artworks, poems, people wrote songs and sent them to me. It evolved so organically, I feel like I didn't do anything. I just grabbed hold of everything that was being given to me, and kept marching it forward."

Others also shared with Jenny their own stories of dealing with mental illness.

"I felt like they were looking towards me and handing me their stories, and I felt a responsibility to do something with them," she said. "People were trusting me with their deepest feelings, and that's just a privilege. I felt like I wanted to do something, not only for Bernie, but also for everybody else."

Yet initially Jenny had to deal with not just her grief but anger. She felt the mental health system had let down her brother. She had sought help for him before he died, and it didn't arrive.

She felt hopelessness. But, Jenny realised, if she was going to help others and give them hope, she had to "rewrite the narrative".

"If you can remove yourself from that problem-saturated narrative, and rewrite what you want the story to be, which was one of hope in that we can help other people, one of forgiveness," she explained.

"I was gaining strength and encouragement from the people in Bernie's community, and they were gaining strength, hope and encouragement from Bernie's story, in that there was a chance we could make a difference, if we all banded together, and if we all have the right heart, which is one of kindness and compassion."

In ways he perhaps could not have imagined, The Man in the Doorway opened doors for his little sister, for so many people. Jenny Allen became a mental health reform advocate. She joined advisory committees, wrote reports and made submissions to governments.

She became a voice for her brother, for all who live with mental illness, and for those who love and care for them.

She helped bring about some changes in practices and procedures and, by speaking up herself, she encouraged people to talk about mental health.

Jenny Allen has boundless faith in people: less so in the mental health system.

"My focus used to be on the system. I no longer have any hope for that. I don't know if we can change the system. But my focus has shifted onto people, in that we can help people, and we can help each other."

It is the same philosophy that Jenny Allen has seen being enacted locally during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a residential mental health worker, so she has been helping people cope with the changes the virus has imposed on daily lives. But she has seen people helping each other in myriad, subtle ways.

"I think the community has done an exceptional job in leaning on each other and finding strength in one another, that we're not going through this alone," she said. "It's actually all of us."

And for anyone struggling at this time, Jenny made this suggestion: "Tell somebody. Hand your story to somebody. Give them the privilege of holding your story for you, so they can check up on you... And know that recovery is not only just possible, it's inevitable. So hang in there, and things will get better."

Lifeline: 13 11 14

Read more: Bernie Sessions' funeral

Read more: Family remembers Bernie Sessions

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