My big brother is diagnosed shortly after with stage 4 bowel cancer, at the age of 42. He is put on a special, private trial, the conditions of which are particularly grim. If you survive a year on the treatment, it’s free. If you die within a year of your diagnosis, you pay.
We paid.
My sister mentions casually that she has precancerous polyps in her stomach. She brings it up like it’s just a new thing in town.
“Did you hear, the priest skipped the sermon so everyone could get home to watch the football.”
“They’ve opened up a Nando’s near the local chicken shop.”
“I’ve got pre-cancerous polyps in my stomach.”
There are too many polyps to remove, without removing the entire lining of her stomach, so they just have to keep checking.
Tragicomedy
I am referred to a genetic counsellor who tells me I have suspected Lynch syndrome, a genetic predisposition to certain types of cancer, and it is 97 per cent likely that I will face the same fate as my family.
I ask the doctor if there is anything I can do and they say, “catch it” and so I am chasing. Regular colonoscopies (treat yourself!), breast checks, constant monitoring of my ovaries. Thank God I’m an actress and I love the camera, even if it is a tiny camera working its way through the twists and turns of my insides.
I find myself now using my time as currency. Looking at commitments, jobs, events and evaluating how much of my time will this cost, how much time do I have left? But I am grateful for this. I am deliberate with my time. And this is why I am currently in London to perform my comedy show, Average Bear, at the Soho Theatre. It’s an hour of songs and stories about my family being ripped apart by grief.
Naturally, it’s a comedy. People always ask about the challenge of making grief funny but everyone who’s lost someone knows that tragedy and comedy sit closely together. I chase challenges. I chose comedy because it was the most frightening thing I could think of. Before all of this, I wanted to play the ingénue, the love interest. Now I play funny, loud, complex women. Women with something to lose.
I work as a writer and an actor for TV and theatre. I’m so grateful to be able to do this. I never got myself a backup job, though I have had my share of retail jobs in my early 20s. I didn’t go out and get a teaching degree “just in case”. I’ve had a combination of good luck and hard work and it’s worked out so far.
I’m a cast member and writer of Yolo (HBO Max) as well as Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House Of Fun (Netflix), Koala Man (Disney Plus) and We Interrupt This Broadcast (Channel 7 Aus). Not bad for a teacher’s daughter from Wagga Wagga, teen pregnancy capital of Australia. I pinch myself all the time, but I always knew I was going to work in theatre and TV.
The small things
I was going to tell stories and live a life full of stories to tell. I don’t worry about the future, about retirement. I only worry about laughing with the people I love, making strangers feel things they wouldn’t feel without me, and small, warming pleasures like orange wine with sourdough bread and olive oil.
I have an almost exclusive appreciation for small and silly things. Small, constant things are so much easier to enjoy once you know that large things can so easily slip away. A patch of sun in the winter, a stranger smiling at your dog, another Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson film. Life’s little constant, reliable joys.
I’m writing this on a train to Brighton. As I’m typing, my partner interrupts the flow. He’s just seen deer. Four of them, lying down, one was white. I’ve never seen deer before. I live (most of the time) in Melbourne. I have two choices here. I can smile and politely say, “Sorry. I just have to get this done”, or I can stop typing. Push the deadline of “next stop Brighton” and watch for deer. I stop.
I wrote Average Bear to remind people of the value of small things. To remind them to stop and watch for deer, a sunrise, a woman with such a magnificent fake tan and eyelashes that she can only be described as “from Love Island”.
If I didn’t live in the shadow of this ticking clock, I wouldn’t know the value of its minutes.
My most recent health scare left me getting on a plane to do a show with a body fresh from an operation. A lump had reared its head on my breast and I was scared and tired and sore. Bloody and swollen, I sat on the plane crying quietly.
A flight attendant asks what I drink, and she brings me a whisky free of charge. There is a woman sitting next to me. We don’t exchange any words at all. She reaches out and holds my hand for the entire flight.
Two weeks later, she turns up at my show and I tell her about the lump that had me crying uncontrollably holding her hand, the lump that had just come back as benign. The flight was only an hour and this stranger’s hands were very small. But for an hour, they were the biggest, most important hands in the world.
I didn’t talk to strangers before I lost half of my family and the guarantee of old age. I always talk to strangers now, after shows I greet them with a hug, invite them to tell me stories.
That’s why I’m here, in London, to perform for strangers for an hour in a theatre where no matter how little we have left, we can share it.
