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We have just been at the hospital. Around my mother-in-law Sue's bed were her husband Ben, her children Benjamin and Kat, her grandchildren Eowyn and Cosette, and three of her four siblings, Carol, David and Stephen with their families Leela, Jack, and Josh, and Lloyd, and me. She said: "The doctors told me today I have come to the beginning of the end of my life. I want to laugh, and enjoy beautiful moments with you all. I want you to ask me questions and talk about it. Megan has taught me, and Benjamin, and Kat, that we need to talk and talk and talk and communicate openly and not close up and hide and pretend. I'm not in pain, they have my pain medication under control. Pray that my impacted bowel opens." Her oncologist explained that end stage ovarian cancer involves the abdomen being filled with rolled oats like pieces of cancer - it doesn't attack organs, just spreads in the abdomen. It is causing Sue's bowel to be impacted - he said that if it opens now...
"Sorry"
WOW! A moment in history I’ve longed for and dreamed of happened today. The Australian Parliament apologised to Indigenous Australians for the atrocities committed against them since colonisation. In 1997, an aspiring young journalist, I interviewed Sir Ronald Wilson. He envisioned a Sorry Day, where non-Indigenous Australians looked into the eyes of Indigenous Australians and expressed sorrow for the pain inflicted, the dispossession, the slaughtering, the breaking up of families, the stealing of a generation. After interviewing Indigenous Australians all across the country, Sir Ronald Wilson in the Stolen Generation Report recommended an official apology. John Howard, in response to this, one of the most significant pieces of research in Australian history, ignored its recommendations, sacked Sir Ronald Wilson as head of the Human Rights Commission and crushed the hope of a people who had just begun to think for the first time that the Australian government was going to listen to the...
