Welcome to our regular column series written by your favourite Channel 7 stars.
This week, on the first anniversary of her mum’s death, 7NEWS presenter Angela Cox tells of the pain of watching her mum, Larelle, pass away slowly from cancer.
I guess it’s a pretty grim question. If you had a choice of how to lose someone you love, would it be a sudden death or a long, slow goodbye?
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This question has rolled around in my head a lot over the past 12 months since we lost my mum.
Mum was a force of life. She was beautiful, but that wasn’t what made her someone you never forget. It was how she made you feel. She had a gift. Asked lots of questions, made people feel seen, heard, and special. Like the sun was shining on you.
Perfect strangers would tell me how a brief encounter years before stayed with them. A remarkable woman, they used to say.
Mum had a life full of adventure. But the last 15 years were challenging. Breast cancer first. Surgery, chemo and it went away.
Then it came back, metastasised. Two tumours in her brain. More surgery, more chemo, more radiation, and immunotherapy. Lots more tumours. Then LMD or leptomeningeal disease. Now in the brain and spinal fluid. That was it. The doctors finally gave up. But mum didn’t.
Through it all she was fiercely determined to beat cancer and live life to the fullest.
When she got the LMD diagnosis they gave her weeks, maybe months. She lasted four years.
She didn’t grow bitter. If anything, she softened. She found grace. Mum was never happy to sit still but, in the end, cancer stole her ability to move easily. She was wheelchair-bound, COVID-bound and, in the end, bed-bound. And she never smiled more. Her body was dying but her spirit was strong.
In a recent interview with New Idea about a campaign to support those who care for loved ones, I was asked if her death scarred me. No, it wasn’t her death, I explained, it was the dying that almost broke me.
After such a long, strong fight for life that kept getting harder by the day, her death, when it came, was peaceful. She was surrounded by her three adult children, and her son-in-law, who she regarded as her own. She was surrounded by love. If you have to die, that’s the best you can hope for.
I can reconcile her death, knowing she is no longer in pain, no longer frustrated with her quality of life. When I’m feeling spiritual, I even imagine her reuniting with her mum and dad in whatever afterlife may exist.
But it’s harder to reconcile the slow, drawn-out years of her dying. The years when her body and mind started letting down her spirit.
There is nothing more heartbreaking than watching someone so in love with life losing their life force. I still cry when I think about those moments.
It would be easier to shut down your heart, not leave it so exposed to those big, difficult feelings. Sitting with the intensity of the grief that comes with losing someone slowly is like holding your feet too close to a fire. The longer you sit there, the more it burns. But you can’t love someone properly with a closed heart.
Sometimes I wish we’d just lost her suddenly, unexpectedly. But then I think how hard it would be not being able to say goodbye. Not given this bittersweet gift of being able to show her how much we loved her, by caring for her when she needed us most.
I still haven’t worked out the answer to my question.
But I have worked out a few other things. Lessons of life, or death — whichever way you see it.
I’ve learned not to waste a day. About six months after she died, I started learning to surf. I am terrible. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve tried. But no matter how humiliating, how rubbish the conditions are, or even, now it’s winter, how cold the wind and water might be, I get in and give it a go.
Because every day I am alive, I am determined to make the most of it. I am no longer putting things off.
I’m pretty old to be learning to surf. Most people out there are at least two, maybe three decades younger. I even have concerned friends telling me it’s dangerous for older people to surf, that I might injure my back or hips.
Each comment only galvanises my resolve. To steal a quote from a great film: “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” I’m not ready to start dying, so I’m getting busy living. Mum loved the surf. She loved life. I know it’s exactly what she’d want me to do.
