About us

My name is Emmaline. This is a blog about my experience of having advanced cancer and living with my husband, Rainer, and our two young daughters (a three year old and a nine month old). The blog is primarily intended to give information and updates to family and friends, but please feel free to get in touch with me if you have a similar diagnosis or circumstance. People with our diagnoses are rare, after all. 

I'm writing this blog because I find it hard to talk about my situation and I couldn't bear to send out email updates. When I am unwell, I invariably retreat. When I am really unwell, I often cannot speak at all. But paradoxically, the best thing to come out of this period of illness has been the way we've become more deeply embedded in the shining constellations of our family and friends, close and scattered as they are. I want to try to respond to everyone's generosity by being as open and engaged as I am able, since that is probably all I have to give at this point. Even though this looks like a monologue, it really is intended to be grounded in our friendships, and it might open up new lines of communication. I will be grateful if you find time to read, comment, email me, or talk in any way that suits

My aim is to talk about my subjective experience of cancer and parenting, not least because mortality is never discussed enough in our society. As far as I am able, I'm keeping in mind that this is a publicly accessible set of documents and am trying to do no harm. I'm avoiding using anyone's surname except my own, but I've agreed with those closest to me that I won't use password-protection. I want this source of information to be accessible to anyone affected by our story. Before I became ill, I was working on a thesis about collaborative anthropologies and much of my work involved finding new methods for working alongside artists and research subjects as they represented themselves in public. And now I am trying to portray my own subjective experience, and to be non-intrusive to those around me. I'm guessing that this will mean that the extent to which I depend on other people to maintain a semblance of everyday life might be downplayed in the blog. Please know that I am immensely, compulsively, grateful to everyone who has supported me and my little family. I am so grateful that I can hardly breathe. I think about you very much more often than will ever be apparent here

More info about the blog

The very humid banner design is by Ms Tessa Fluence, who has been doing ridiculous amounts of design work for our family lately. She can be found via hypergraphia.com.au. The photo in the banner is from Flickr creative commons.

All other photos on this blog are our family photos of ourselves and our garden. Please do not reproduce them anywhere else. All writing is my own, please do not reproduce anywhere else without discussing it with me first. 

Please ask me any questions you think of and I will do my best to answer. Let me know if I should start an FAQ. And please let me know your reactions to anything, particularly if I've handled something badly. This blog is about connection.