“No one has told Summer I’m dying, but I have the oxygen cylinders beside me and she knows how to switch it on for me when Nanna needs oxygen. We have a really close relationship and for the last two weeks she needed to sleep with me every night. She wanted to sleep in my arms, with both hands over our hearts and we slept like that all night. The other day she said to Jade (her mum), ‘Is Nanny dying?’. She said ‘She’s really, really sick, we don’t know,’ then she said, ‘I don’t want Nanny to die, it will make me so, so sad.’
When she lay down with me, she said, ‘Nanny when you die, do you know you float up in the clouds and you meet this really, really, really nice man and you won’t be lonely anymore, but you’ll be in my heart so that’s Ok. And a little baby will be born and you’ll be their Nanny.’
And I said, ‘Wow, where did you get that honey?’ and she said, ‘I just thought it.’”
The impact of COVID-19
The initial plan was for Marlene to spend her end of life at McCulloch House in Melbourne but because of COVID-19 that meant she couldn’t have any visitors and she wanted to be surrounded by family.
“COVID has had a huge impact and we’ve had to get letters of compassion for my family to be able to leave Melbourne and visit me. When they gave me a diagnosis that I had weeks to live because my liver was shutting down, they let my son, his wife and their two kids visit me even though no visitors were allowed. Apart from the patients and doctors, they were the only people in the hospital. You could hear children laughing and everyone would stop and look at them in the courtyard and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s how it used to be and that’s what we hope to get to again’.
“I’ve said it quite a few times, but dying in COVID is a pain in the arse.”
Approaching the end
Marlene is adamant that she doesn’t want you to feel sorry for her. Although her story is coming to an end, she is at peace with it.
She has done what she set out to do. She gave her children a good life, she saw them grow from boys into good men and she has met her grandchildren. She feels blessed.
“My daughter in law said to me today, ‘How do you feel, Mum?’ And I said I feel really good, I’m not scared, I’m sad because I won’t see my grandchildren grow up,” Marlene says.
“When I was diagnosed with mets (metastatic breast cancer) I said I want my boys to have partners who will climb into bed with them the day I die and hold them. They’ve got them.
“Now they are both married to the most amazing, supportive, strong women that will hold them up. We were the three musketeers for so long and it’s going to be really hard, I know that. That’s the part that makes me sad, leaving them. I’ve looked after them and protected them all their lives.”
Knowing she was living on borrowed time also gave Marlene a strong drive to help others. She was involved with the Breast Cancer Network Australia, founded a support group to help other women navigate breast cancer and brought dragon boating to Gippsland to encourage other women to focus on their health.
One of her proudest achievements was holding writing workshops in rural Victoria for cancer patients so women could tell their stories. In 2006 they published a collection, Heartsongs in the Key of C: Women Writing About Breast Cancer.
“I realised how powerful the written word was,” Marlene says.
“I’m talking to you so that when my grandkids are teenagers and they’re wondering about their Nanny, they can get to know me. I used to be a good writer, but I can’t do it anymore so this will do. And this is only the second 30 years of my life, but it’s okay, because everyone else – my mum and my brothers – will fill in the first 30 years for them.”