Podcast review: Dear Alana

Content note: The podcast Dear Alana and this article discuss mental health issues, grief, loss, and suicide. Helpful resources can be found on the Dear Alana website, here.

I’m turning 24 in two weeks’ time. I’m starting a new job next week, settling back into life in London. Going for coffee with school friends, being caught without an umbrella in a sudden downpour, putting in my earphones as I try in vain to block out the screeches of the Tube, the arteries bringing life into the Capital each morning.

I remember an older friend at the Catholic Chaplaincy receiving a card on her 24th birthday which contained a list of saints who had died at the age of 24. It was a rollcall of your average millennial’s favourite saints: St Thérèse of Lisieux, Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, St Kateri Tekakwitha, St Elizabeth of Hungary. Underneath, in scrawled writing, the friend had added ‘Ora pro nobis’ - pray for us.

There’s another name I’d like to see on that list one day. And indeed, as Catholics believe in the Communion of Saints, it is a name that already counts among that number: Alana Chen. She died in December 2019, two months after her 24th birthday.

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Dear Alana is an eight-part series in which Simon Kent Fung tells Alana’s story. It’s like listening to the spiritual memoir of a saint. Except this is 2023, so it’s a podcast on Spotify, with voice recordings, interviews, snippets of news stories and talks, and the hauntingly beautiful melody of Toulouse’s I will follow you drifting in and out of each episode.

From the first episode I knew this wasn’t going to be an easy listen.

An early experience of a relative's hospitalisation following episodes of depression and paranoia had left me with an insight into the vulnerability of the human mind. It’s incredibly difficult to see a person you know and love so well transform to a point where you can barely recognise them from the words and ideation they are expressing..

And I’ve seen how Catholic doctrine and belief can become caught up in this spiral too, how dubious documents and webpages warning of damnation can lead to an unhealthy fixation with sin, brokenness, and self-hatred.

Alana is raised in a practising family, but begins to take her Catholic faith more seriously after attending Camp Wojtyla, after being persuaded to go by some young missionaries after Mass one Sunday.

I look it up on Instagram and the feed loads with exactly the sort of images I expected. Young people laughing against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, a priest lifting a chalice as he celebrates Mass outdoors, smiling young nuns in grey habits, an image of the young man Karol Wojtyla - who would become the great St Pope John Paul II – in the Polish mountains.

When Alana returns from camp she begins to slip off to daily Mass without her mother realising, and her journals – sensitively handled by Simon – show a growing devotion to her faith. She writes out lyrics of praise and worship songs, Bible Psalms, and articulates her desire to live for Jesus. She is striving for holiness. For sainthood.

The faith and Church which Alana encounters and the vocation she feels drawn to is one which Simon captures so well – not least because it is also one he knows and loves. He also discerned a vocation to the religious life. The echoes of his own story he finds as he tells Alana’s story render the podcast with a beautiful, yet at times deeply sorrowful, tension.

And as the podcast unfolds, I can picture the characters, the social settings myself. Even though it is thousands of miles away, the Catholic student scene I became so familiar with at University is immediately recognisable.

The joyful and bubbly older students and missionaries whom she meets at the Newman Centre, the young dynamic Chaplain whose homilies are witty and compelling, the gradual crescendo of the music at the Adoration Evening of FOCUS' ‘SEEK’ Conference she attends in Nashville in 2015. The handsome and thoughtful Catholic guy who everyone is whispering she should date.

I can see my world in Alana’s world. I have even listened to the very talk about moral relativism which Simon plays a clipping of, I can identify the background music, the speakers' voices. And as Simon mentions in passing a Catholic project he was involved in working in a city I also once lived in, and I look him up and discover we have a mutual connection, I realise that this is not just similar to the Church I know, this is my Church. I feel my stomach churning and press pause, going downstairs to drink some water.

It is undeniable that the Church is responsible for so much of Alana’s suffering. She writes it herself. As a young teenager, she begins to meet with a priest who acts as her Spiritual Director and confidante, without the knowledge of her mother. He is the only one she speaks to about her sexuality. She is pointed to ministries, events, and counsellors, who perpetuate narratives and practice therapy in a way which lead her to feel like she is broken. That she has a problem which must be fixed in order to fulfil her vocation.

Her mother and her sisters try to intervene. Her mother calls a meeting with the priest to express her concern at his behaviour to no avail. As her sister later reflects, it is as if they cannot reach Alana past all these other voices and walls.

After Alana seeks and receives therapy from elsewhere following a suicide attempt, she appears to be on the path towards accepting her own sexuality and identity. Yet the Catholic community and support system she was so reliant on before is disappearing before her eyes – the nuns, the priest, the friends from campus ministry. She transfers University and takes some time at home where her new friends visit and tell her they miss her, and want her back on campus.

But Alana will not make it back to campus. Only two months after celebrating her 24th birthday, she leaves home to go on a hiking trip by the Gross Reservoir, from which she will not return.

Her cause of death, as determined by the coroner, is suicide.

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Dear Alana is tragic. The depth of Alana’s suffering - and the depth of the grief of those she left behind – is tangible and raw.

But so is the light which Alana brought to the lives of those around her. There are the notes in the scrapbook which she regularly swaps with her childhood best friend Joy, her boundless enthusiasm for her Ultimate Frisbee teammates, the letter she receives from a homeless woman she used to speak to who has now moved elsewhere. A deep love for her family, and for Jesus and His Church.

And it is this love of God, of Christ, His Church and His Mission, which will cause Alana such conflict and distress as she tries to reconcile it with her sexuality. She suffers through experiences of harmful conversion therapy, manipulation, and eventual isolation from the community she so deeply loved.

Dear Alana is heartbreaking.

It raises urgent questions about the Church’s pastoral care of vulnerable teenagers, relationships and boundaries between clergy and young people, the understanding of mental health, the treatment of those who are hurt and let down by the Church, and their families and friends.

It forces one to confront the Church’s teaching on sexuality and the responsibilities and failures of those who are teaching it.

Dear Alana is told so evocatively that one can hardly look away. Yet from the accounts of Alana’s mother, Joyce, and of Simon, it seems that many still are.

It doesn’t take more than a cursory google to find a brief statement from the local diocese, to see that the priests of this story are still responsible for growing student communities (which in turn are raising the next generation of priests), publishing their own insensitive blog articles, and refusing to respond to Simon’s request for comment, standard journalistic good practice.

It leaves me frustrated and saddened – how many more have been failed, let down, by the Church? The Church is reaching the end of a month-long Synod at the Vatican, where it has been concluded that “to progress in its discernment, the Church absolutely needs to listen to everyone”.

And with regards to abuse, it has said the Church has a duty “to commit herself concretely and structurally to ensuring that this does not happen again.” Will it?

The final episode closes with a poem written by Alana, snatched by her sister from their family home as it was engulfed by a wildfire in Boulder in 2021, in another crushing blow to the family. Its inclusion reminds me of the poems penned by St Thérèse of Lisieux, often included in the final pages of her best-selling autobiography, Story of a Soul.

The sun begins to shine through my bedroom curtains just as I listen to Alana’s words, read by her sister and by Simon.

“… Tomorrow that shadow will fade into a brilliant light, and that shadow will never return”.

The poem fades down and drifts back into the lilting tune of I will follow you. Tears are running down my face.

I’m turning 24 in two weeks’ time.

Dear Alana, pray for us.

You can listen to Dear Alana on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. More information about Alana's story and the Alana Faith Chen Foundation can be found here: Dear Alana, Official Website.