Sarah Mamalai reluctantly describes herself as a miracle survivor of brain cancer. Reluctantly, because she feels the word miracle is dismissive of other brain cancer patients who have died or are still fighting the disease.
The Canberra mum has survived terminal brain cancer, three brain surgeries and a stroke she suffered during the third operation, forcing her to now use a walker and leaving her with a blind spot in one eye.
But despite those travails, Sarah always continued to embrace life. Between her first and second operations, she walked the Kokoda Trail. She started the annual Brainstorm for a Cure gala in Canberra. Headline acts included the Hoodoo Gurus, Jon Stevens and Daryl Braithwaite, and the event over six years raised more than $2 million for the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation. She continued to volunteer in her community. She was nominated as ACT Local Hero in the Australian of the Year awards. She had, and has, a wry sense of humour.
Sarah's cancer is in remission, she is learning to walk again. But, understandably, her family's concern was always about her health.
So nothing could prepare Sarah for the death of her husband Oscar - big, strong, strapping Oscar - who had been her carer as well as her best friend.
In the worst twist possible, Oscar died from an out-of-the-blue brain aneurysm, passing away in the Canberra Hospital on his 46th birthday, on May 2 this year. One moment he was there; the next he was gone.
"He woke up and said, 'Sarah, I'm going to go hospital, I've got a really bad headache'. And I was like, 'God, really'? And then he said, 'Oh no, I'll sleep it off'. Then I said, 'You never mention hospitals, you need to go'," she says, sitting in their loungeroom in Pearce.
"We got up there and he wouldn't let us go in with him. I think he subconsciously knew how hard it would be. I can't drive, I've got a blind spot from the stroke. My son was driving. Oscar, he was always making it as easy as possible for us. He said, 'I'll call you'.
"It was only an hour later that the phone rang, and I picked it up and I just heard the words, 'I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, your husband has had a massive bleed on the brain and he's in theatre'. So he was in surgery within an hour and we had just been waiting for the call to pick him up."
Sarah and a close friend went straight to the hospital and waited for five hours until her husband was out of theatre. Oscar was in the Canberra Hospital for six days. He was taken off life support and passed away on his 46th birthday. Sarah made the decision to let him go, with the help of their boys, Joe, 17, and William, 14, both students at Marist College.
"They were fully aware of what was going on," she says. "Hearing them speak to their dad after we made the call, saying, 'I'll make you proud Dad, I'll make you proud'. 'You've taught us everything we need to know'. Real little mini-Oscars.
"And then afterwards when people were coming to the house, I could see them modelling him. He was a fantastic host. Just a very amicable, funny guy. And I was so proud of the boys. Well, they had to grow up on the spot. None of us really debated the option. After three bleeds on the brain, he wouldn't be able to function and he wouldn't be Oscar. As a couple, you talk about that, but when you actually have to face it, I knew what he would want and what he wouldn't want. He was such a quality man and I wanted him to have quality of life.
"It's funny, though, people kind of become saints after they pass. You don't focus on the bad. It's a beautiful thing, actually, but he wasn't a saint. No-one is. But it's a phenomenon."
It was surreal to lose him in such a way.
"We've had five brain surgeries between us," she says. "It was a sudden, random brain burst. There's no rhyme nor reason to it. But what I was able to say to the boys was, 'Don't ever ask why' because there is no answer, there will never be an answer."
Oscar's funeral was held on a friend's property at Bungendore. The procession was accompanied by haunting traditional music from Papua New Guinea, his home country. Due to COVID-19, the family had to make applications to the federal government asking for his parents and siblings in PNG to be able to attend the funeral. Sarah's community came together, writing emails, making phone calls, imploring bureaucrats and politicians to let the family in. Ultimately, only his sister was allowed into the country to say goodbye to her brother.
"That was heartbreaking. Heartbreaking," Sarah says. "I think the word compassionate is thrown around but I don't think it is compassionate to have one person alone in a room grieving in a strange country. Two people, to me, would have been compassionate. "
Oscar's sister had to stay quarantined in a flat alone. His funeral was videoed and live-streamed to his family back in PNG.
At the funeral, friends from school, work and rugby spoke of "The Big O", a gentle, amiable man who loved the West Tigers, inexplicably VB beer, the water, the stars, nature. He was proud of the work he did at the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, where he had been a policy officer for 20 years.
The story of Sarah and Oscar is a great love story, not only between them, but between themselves and their wider community. The couple met while both studying at the University of Canberra. They were just 19, living in the on-campus residences.
"Oscar and I met when he ran past my window on university residence in a pair of white shorts and I nearly gave myself whiplash," Sarah said at his funeral, that sense of humour still intact, her boys standing behind her, handsome in black suits, as she spoke to the outdoor congregation.
They started dating, "had our first connection at Stone Day", their first kiss at "Jolly Jugs", the cheap beer night at the legendary Pandora's nightclub in Civic. He proposed while they were snorkelling in Papua New Guinea. There were two weddings in 1999, one in PNG and one in Australia.
"So many people would call him their best friend. 'Best friend to many' is what I'm going to have on his tombstone. He made people feel really important and if he was talking to you, he was really talking to you. And he was funny. He always had a line from a song or a movie. He was always quoting The Godfather or Muhammad Ali.
"What I keep reminding myself is how lucky I was to have him for that long. Twenty-seven years together. He really stuck by me. You couldn't meet a more loyal man."
Oscar's ability to get on with people must have been shaped by him being sent from Papua New Guinea at the age of 12 to boarding school at St Patrick's College in Goulburn. It would have been an incredible culture shock for such a little boy.
"He said he woke up on his first morning and looked up in this old building in St Pat's and they had an ornate cornice thing on the ceiling and he was like, 'Where am I'? And his afro had all gone flat on one side," Sarah, 46, says with a laugh.
"His dad had told him, 'When you speak to someone, you have to address them properly. If someone asks, 'How are you?', you say, 'I'm well thank you, how are you'? And he started off doing that at school and that didn't last long. He got back to PNG in the first holidays and he was like, 'G'day dad'." She laughs. "His school mates have been amazing, they're like brothers, they grew up together."
The loss of Oscar has brought the real meaning of community to the fore. People wanted to help. In any way they could.
"It was smack bang in the middle of COVID and his friends all arrived at the hospital and most of them couldn't get in. And they were saying, 'What can we do? What can we do'? And I was looking at these big men just desperately needing to do something," Sarah said. "And I said to them, 'Oscar has had a vision for his garden for years but we've been so time-poor that he hasn't been able to do it'. So, within two days, my god, it was a backyard blitz. And a front-yard blitz. It was amazing. It's a living tribute. I love it. It was love through action."
A neighbour also painted a PNG mural on the wall. People came with food. They fixed things. "We had learnt through my journey how to receive with grace. My mum said to me, 'Give with grace and receive with grace' because it's overwhelming to receive such an outpouring of love because it happened with me. And I never expected it to happen again in one family, one little family of four," she says.
"I had all these people coming into the house and doing odd jobs and fixing things that had been broken for ages, I kind of found myself sitting on the couch and kind of surrendered to the day, that's how I got through."
Sarah also praised the National Disability Insurance Scheme for helping to fill the breach left by Oscar, who also cared for her while maintaining a full-time job. She has been on the NDIS since 2015, but it has helped with modifications to the house and carers to help her get on with her daily life.
"If I got stuck in the bath, neither me nor my sons would recover if they had to help me out," she says, with a laugh.
The family will remember Oscar. His birthday next May will be "a festival of Oscar" with music, food, family, friends. Next year, his boys plan to walk Kokoda in his honour.
There are photos of Oscar around the house including one of him smiling right through the lens. He was never one for selfies but, for some reason, just before his death, he asked Will to take a photo of him. It now sits in the loungeroom. Sarah loves it. But it's never enough.
"I'm really missing him constantly humming and singing in the kitchen. It's quiet," she says.
Sarah can take some solace in the many people who have her back. And those of her sons.
One mourner at the funeral told the boys, despite their sadness, they were held in good stead. Because "you are the sons of Oscar and Sarah, the bravest people I know".
