Don't Follow Your Dreams - Chase Them

We are moving house. It's an arduous task packing boxes, deciding what to keep or dispose of.

We started in the lounge room. Our lounge room is formal and full of antiques. It is my favourite room in the house, and one that I will miss.

We have a Tasmanian Oak sideboard from the 1800's. We use it to display our Christmas village, or cards from special occasions. Consequently, the drawers are full of various mementos, from events gone by.

I flicked through a bunch of old birthday cards. Most of them were crudely scribed from my son's young friends. I smiled as I reminisced his different changes of age, his wonderful juvenile parties.

My heart suddenly sunk. I found some cards from my 40th birthday party. One of them, so beautifully written, was from my darling friend Cherie.

Cherie was the sister I never had. She was younger than me, but it didn’t matter…we connected. We shared a sense of humour and revelled in each other’s naughtiness.

I will always think of Cherie at Christmas time. I remember having to stop her from disrupting the neighbours, after she gleefully emptied the cocktail machine, at one of the parties we had here. She was ALWAYS funny!

I worked with Cherie. She was a young accountant doing her professional year and was really struggling. She had failed a few units, and it used to really rock her.
She buried herself in her love for the gym and her dog.

Cherie made bad boyfriend choices and we often joked about this. She was madly in love with a policeman and was eventually engaged, until she found out he had been involved with a fellow officer and she was now pregnant. Cherie was devestated…that was late 2005.

In early 2006, Cherie received the news her mum had lung cancer. We spent many long nights on the phone, as Cherie struggled to come to terms with this. Soon after, my own mother became terminally ill, so she extended her support towards me, and the bond became tighter.

It was about August/September of 2006 when a very white faced young lady came in to the filing room, carrying a large envelope from a pathology lab. She asked me to come in to her office and to take a look at it.

Cherie had been experiencing back pain for some time. She had a life of calasthenics and other sports, so it was thought the pain can come from this, but her pain became more and more unbearable.

She explained to me that she had had a series of scans to rule out possibilities for the back pain, and was supposed to take the envelope to her doctor, but she had opened it..
We both cried as we read the report, "Severe mestatics disease suspected". We got on to the internet and googled and cried some more as we became informed at just how grim the news was. A couple of the older women in the office tried to be encouraging, but the results were not good.

“The lesions in my lungs are bigger than my mums!!” she whispered to me.

Ironically, she had just begun dating a lovely guy she had met on the bus to the Delta Goodrem concert, and she wrestled with how she was going to break this awful news to him, so early in their relationship.

She was incredibly brave. We spoke constantly and she always managed to find something to laugh about, as she began more and more investigations in to her tumours.

I would always get a text right after an appointment..things like “yeah, my bone marrow is clear!” She was forever optimistic and wanted us to be as well.

She was feeling pretty sick by my 40th birthday party on October 12. She sat quietly on the couch, but I knew it was incredibly special having her there.

Cherie then started radiation and chemo therapy…she was constantly swollen and sick and wasn’t keen for people to see her like this. We would talk on the phone most days, and I even offered her my eggs (she was saddened by the idea of losing her fertility).

On a Monday, in late November, I had a long phone call with Cherie. She was in the hospital. We joked about her coming to live with me…all sorts of things. She sounded optimistic and vibrant.

Just a few days later, we had the most awful text message “Cherie is heading towards the light”
I remember breaking down and crying out, “What the hell does that mean???”

Following this we received a bunch of confused and saddened phone calls from mutual friends. We knew they had taken her much loved dog in to the Mount Hospital, so things were certainly not going well.

A few days later, on November 29, 2006 my beautiful Cherie passed away.

The French translation of Cherie is sweetheart and she really was!
Cherie’s death would be in vane if we didn’t learn from it. From that day I took very little for granted. I embraced life more and realised we have to chase our dreams. I no longer cared as much about what people thought and remembered to tell people I loved them.

You often hear..”Life is short” and it really can be! you need to embrace each day as if it is your last

I will always love you Cherie ooxxoxox