Threads of Endurance

Grief, resilience, and finding humanity in fractured times

There were really only two people on the planet who could get away with calling me Dan. One was my dad Billy, gone eleven years now. The other was my mum Denise, who died last week. For the rest, it’s Daniel.

Getting that down feels strange, final and yet somehow unreal. Death barges in uninvited, leaving emptiness where conversation used to be. Since she died, I’ve found myself not just missing her but noticing how precarious everything feels, how mortality sharpens the edges until the fragility of all our lives comes into sharp focus.

My mother was strong, independent, and clever, the steady bedrock of my childhood.

With Dad away for days at a time, working as a Telecom linesman, she raised the three of us on her own and during those long days and nights, authority and tenderness lived side by side in her, and her presence, even from a distance, was a tightly threaded line to tether myself and sense of self to until the end.

She was fierce, never afraid of conflict when it mattered, in defence or attack. She faced problems head‑on, unafraid of sharp words or hard truths or the consequences that might shatter in the collision. When broader family disputes surfaced, often stirred by the prejudices aroused by an Aboriginal man marrying an English woman, she stood firm in defending Dad and in defending us. There was never, ever a backward step.

But it’s the ordinary things I return to now she’s gone. The cadence of her voice with its lingering British lilt, the odd remark that cut through nonsense, the quiet pride she carried for her children. Those moments, small on their own, add up to something enduring, it becomes a legacy. When I was a boy, I think of us sifting through the hundreds of 45s she and Dad had accumulated through the years. Like a nugget in the silt, we stumbled upon I Saw Her Standing There. We sang it at the top of our voices, not missing a beat, as if nothing else in the world mattered for those two minutes and fifty-five seconds. It may have only been a flicker, but it sits in my memory as one of the happiest moments of my life.

Found it!!

In later years we drifted, as parents and children do as often as they don’t, yet whenever we spoke she wanted to catch up on my world.

Our last conversation, the week before last, as she struggled for breath, stays with me. I told her about Yoorrook and Treaty, and she told me she was proud of me. That’s enough to get you through anything. The words linger with a weight far beyond the moment they were spoken.

I was proud of her too, for making the best of what she was given. For surviving a childhood marked by the loveless marriage of her parents and the broken pieces of a broken home, shattered by the irreconcilable. For living alone at sixteen in a flat in North Melbourne, isolated and a world away from the whole love her precious grandparents. For joining the army when there was nowhere else to turn, where she met Dad. For raising three kids. For living life on her own terms. Proud of her strength, her toughness, her persistence, and her refusal to back down when something needed to be faced.

Her passing sharpens another truth. Mortality is never only private, it is shared, we all experience its urgency when we lose someone. I am not on this train alone.

We live in fractured times. Climate unravelling, wars burning, truth corroded, politics cracking at the seams. The loss of her and ensuing absence makes it all feel closer. The long decline of her health, ending in her passing, is a reminder that some realities cannot be wished away, that crises must be met with honesty and resolve rather than polite avoidance.

It is easy to sink into grief and uncertainty, yet despair is not the only option. What carries us are the fragments that remain, the stories, habits, values that ripple outward. Memory becomes inheritance, not of wealth but of something far greater, example. The way someone lived, the courage they showed when people and justice have to be met head on. There are millions of such examples which have touched us all and to forget that is the danger of this moment we all find ourselves. To remember is to resist silence, to stand firm when truth demands to be spoken.

Reflecting on her example I am reminded that too often today, hesitation is dressed up as balance, evasiveness as perspective. What passes for centrism is often a way of avoiding reality’s sharp edges. Mum never played that game, it was clear where she stood on any debate, whether I liked it or not. She said what she thought, even if it caused friction - real friction.

But now, I only see love and resilience. She endured loss, hardship, change, and still stood while her legs could support her. Now I know, for sure, resilience is not the absence of grief but the act of carrying grief forward without letting it break us. Her persistence becomes a lesson in endurance, an insistence on carrying on even when things grow thin, and on facing challenges rather than pretending they aren’t there.

The passing of a love one places all in the broader context of our own lives. I don’t have answers for the scale of uncertainty we face right now. I can’t fix the climate crisis, or untangle the unhinged politics of our age, the global ramifications of small men who can’t help themselves, and the rise of hate that shuts out its own insecurity. But I know this, small acts matter. Care matters, memory matters, truth matters. Against leaders dodging responsibility and commentators dismissing crisis as noise, these things loom large. They are choices, the choice not to fall into silence, the choice to stand firm when conflict cannot be avoided.

Mum and Barry

For me, Mum’s death distils to a simple truth: life is fragile, yet connections endure. Even in frightening times, even when mortality presses close, we are not alone. We carry each other forward in stories, in memories, in the quiet ways we show up. Her worldly presence may be gone, but her example for me continues in the steadiness to speak plainly and in the resolve to face hard truths.

She told me she was proud of me. I want to live in a way that honours that, and more than that, in a way that honours our shared humanity. In times like these, when uncertainty is the air we breathe, it is humanity, our care, our resilience, our memory that steadies us against despair. I have felt it most keenly in the love and support of friends and family, the shoulders to cry on, the messages sent late at night, the quiet presence of those who sit beside you when there are no words. There are no words to describe what all that means.

The world may feel as though it is unravelling in every direction, yet if we hold our ground and see through all of the dust without turning away, there remains the chance to build something enduring. Something fragile, luminous and worth passing on.

In her passing she left me this last lesson: that even at the edge of uncertainty, life’s worth lies in what we carry forward.

Thanks Mum.