A vulnerable share and a reminder of our resilience.

It’s a cruel irony that our darkest nights lead to our brightest mornings. When I lost my parents to cancer 15 years ago I thought it was the beginning of the end. With time and space wedged firmly between me and the darkest period of life, I’ve been able to reflect on how the experience shaped me. While both my parents deserve recognition and compassion, it’s my mum whose example I come back to time and again.

I remember my dad as passionate, deep thinking, confident, extroverted, charming and someone who felt the depths of the ocean. His presence dominated growing up. When he was happy the world was dizzy with excitement and the joy of just being alive. When he was down it felt like we were surrounded by a dense fog that no-one could see their way out of.

For most of my early years we lived life through the gaze of a hopeless optimist whose only fear was mediocracy. This combination meant we were constantly “experiencing”. New cultures, new people, new places. Sometimes flying in as VIP’s to the Commonwealth Games, sitting next to royalty. Others we were in sea planes going into remote villages of New Guinea, staying in mud flats and drinking from coconuts. Not because it was trendy but because it’s hot and coconuts are easy to come by.

When I was 9 years old my dad was diagnosed with bowel cancer. It seemed he had known for awhile but had been afraid to go to the doctor and have it confirmed. For someone who’s greatest passion in life was feeling alive, it was enough to kill him on the spot. In many ways, the man I knew did die that day although it would take two more years for him to physically pass.

In the background was my mum, playing the supporting role. Mum was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 4 years old. She was quiet, cold, direct, reserved. She did not wear her heart on her sleeve but in a beautifully carved wooden box hidden in the back of her wardrobe. While this description might make it seem like we had a strained relationship, we didn’t. I adored my mum. What people saw as cold I saw as someone who didn’t feel the need to be anything other than who and what she was. I saw her directness as honest and being reserved made her thoughtful. She didn’t add to the noise because she felt she had to. She was considered and level and even funny. And while everyone throughout my life has always been drawn to my father’s flame, I find myself drawn to the ones standing on the side lines. For what few people realise is that for every dizzying high comes an inevitable, crashing low.

My mum lived with cancer for 10 years before she passed away when I was 14. Through that time, she not only dealt with her own diagnoses but with finding out her husband had cancer, watching his mental struggle and collapse, the physical pain he endured as she cared for him and then ultimately the anguish of losing her soul mate and becoming a single parent to two young girls and the sole owner of a failing business. Watching my dads body decompose before our very eyes was torture. Watching, knowing that it will eventually be you, is cruelly inhumane.

Throughout my life my mum was stable. You knew the person who was going to walk through the door that night and how she was going to respond to you. I never heard her complain. Even when her veins collapsed from the chemo, even when she had to have parts of her spine removed because the cancer was spreading. Even when we were broken into for the fourth time since my dad had died. While she may not have been perfect, she was a force to be reckoned with. She had two girls to live for and that thought kept her alive for years longer than science predicted.

Time and again I have watched women do the extraordinary as if it’s ordinary. Women who have been given boxes to fit, lines to toe, rooms to stay out of, laws that work to their disadvantage and systems that benefit from their exclusion. Yet time again, I see women breaking barriers, standing for what’s right, blazing new paths and risking it all for the ones they love. We were never promised a life of ease so when adversity arrives, we rise.

The power of women is threatened only by apathy and the inability to recognise our own strength. We stand in the wake of countless women who have fought for our very existence, to not be written out of history but to be seen and accounted for. We have stood together in the face of hopelessness and made it through. I have no doubt we will do it again.

We are powerful beyond measure. No words, no rules, no person, can take that power from us as long as you too know it to be true. I am beyond grateful to have had such a powerful role model whose strength I return to in my darkest moments.