When bad things happen to good people

This news, I must admit, brought tears to my eyes.

When you begin to live your life in a new country, you start to get used to things – how to shop, how to speak the lingo (sort of), meet new people and generally try and do all the things you can to fit in so it starts to feel like home. Then, something like this happens and you realise there’s a whole part of you, a whole history, that can’t be replaced by anywhere else.

Jane McGrath was what I’d call an English Rose. She was pretty, funny (how many women could laugh about their prosthetic breast popping out while they were washing the car?) and loving and genuinely one of those people you’d like to know. She married one of Australia’s famous cricket players, Glenn McGrath and moved her life from England to Australia.

They were a great couple but she died yesterday, at 42, from cancer. She battled it on and off for a decade and was a source of inspiration to all Australians, just for being her and for sharing something I would not have blamed her for being intensely quiet about. Goodness knows how many Australian women’s lives she saved and will save.

When I read she died yesterday, it really hit me. Forty-two, with two young children. I thought how cruel life is and how we have terrorists running around trying to kill as many people as they can, murders and generally shitty people all over to whom nothing much seems to happen. It goes to show that it is indeed true that ‘only the good die young’.

But it also made me think about living in another country and what that means. She did that. And, while Australia might be a bit like England without the green fields, hedgerows and ancient buildings, it’s still different and, like me, she was probably very excited about starting a new part of her life but at some stage possibly realised there was a whole section of her life that had nothing to do with Australia. Family, friends, anecdotes etc. Those jokes you can laugh at only with people you grew up with.

So it seems to me Australia and England will be a bit poorer from now on because it’s people like Jane around us that makes life worth living.