It was an incidental conversation, set off by a hypothetical question: What would you do if you ever had a car accident?
Friends Marina Charlton and Rae Oliver had been catching up over a cup of tea as Charlton’s twins Ella and Olivia, who were not yet two at the time, played beside them. The year was 2012 and in that moment the two women were simply passing time, as they often had since meeting and working alongside one another at a South Island high school.
“I said ‘I don’t know,'” Charlton explains.
“‘I’ve got life insurance. I guess that will pay for a nanny for the girls and they could stay with mum. It would be tough if mum died though, they wouldn’t have anyone.’ And that was all that was said.
“Then the next day Rae rang and said she’d talked to [her husband] Steve and that if I liked I could put in my will that they would look after the girls.”
It’s not an offer anyone would make lightly but it hadn’t been a difficult decision to come to says Oliver, who has been married to Steve for 21 years. They have a blended family of five grown children and 10 grandchildren.
“Marina doesn’t have relatives other than her mum and I look on her as a younger sister. We’re very family-oriented and they’re such lovely girls.”
Charlton continues, “I thought about it… They were a nice couple; the girls knew them. Steve was a steady southern man and together they were yin and yang. So I rang back and said okay.”
In a twist of fate, six weeks later Charlton was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer and given six months to two years to live. She rang Oliver in tears.
“I told her she had to make sure the girls always knew who I was.”
While many of us might consider ‘where would the kids go if we died?’, few come to any conclusions and fewer still follow through with making arrangements. It’s something we daren’t even think about. Yet what position would your children be in if the worst did happen, and you hadn’t made your wishes clear?
Charlton, who has so far stunned her oncologists by still being alive three years after her grim diagnosis, is in a unique situation because her children were conceived by a donor egg and sperm (the first in New Zealand). There is no extended family apart from Charlton’s mother, who recently went into care.
Charlton and Oliver have looked into adoption and legal guardianship through the Family Court. Legal guardianship would mean Ella and Olivia would be eligible for the orphan’s benefit.
Charlton is a secondary school history teacher and has continued to work through her illness running the teen parent unit at Timaru High School because she wants to role-model a strong work ethic to her girls.
She’s grateful to Oliver and her husband for being there for both her and the girls, although this situation hasn’t come without its complexities and challenges.
“If I had a sister and I said, ‘Look I’m dying of cancer,’ she naturally would say ‘don’t worry about your children’. You can just imagine having that conversation,” says Charlton. “There must be a sense of comfort in your children still staying with the family they know. Whereas with my children, we’re creating that relationship under this really stressful situation.
“This shouldn’t put people off having IVF using a donor but what does happen if you die? I do think it should be a bigger consideration at the start. You have to have six hours of counselling by law, and we never had that conversation. That should have happened with a counsellor.”
Oliver understands that for the girls, it will be a major adjustment. “Their lives are going to be turned upside down. They’ll be losing their mother and that’s inconceivable. Their lifestyle will change. Our family is large whereas it’s always just been the three of them. But to them we are Auntie Rae and Uncle Steve.”
The two women have worked hard to bring their families together regularly to create a sense of shared history. There have been Sunday meals and the Olivers have attended all the girls’ birthday parties.
In 2012, Oliver and Charlton took the girls on holiday to Auckland followed by a trip to Picton, where they met with the girls’ egg donor Sarah*, who lives in Australia and flew over especially. Says Charlton,
“Sarah gave them their genetics, I’ve nurtured them, Rae will raise them. It was important to me that Rae and Sarah meet. It has all needed to overlap so the girls can see we’re all part of their story.”
Yet despite the care the two women have taken to manage this scenario in a mindful and sensitive way, Charlton has at times felt protective of her role as Mum, and Oliver has been unsure about how much space to give the trio.
“We’ve converted our woolshed into a family home and one of the rooms is for the girls,” explains Oliver.
“But we’ve stopped calling it the girls’ room because it didn’t seem fair to their mum. Now we call it the Princess Room and our grandchildren stay in it too. Sometimes when the girls cuddle us I wonder how that makes Marina feel. She says she’s happy they love us but we have backed off a bit lately because we want to give Marina that time to be herself with her girls.
“When Marina was first diagnosed she wasn’t given a lot of time, but she’s continued to respond well to her treatment… I don’t want to have her feel we’re just sitting here waiting to grab the girls.”
Says Charlton, “We recently opened the Cancer Society’s Relay for Life event in south Canterbury and there’s a photo of the girls and I cutting the ribbon. Rae’s there to the side and she’s looking on at the girls with such affection. I know she loves the girls and the girls love them. It’s just as I’ve lingered longer this situation has become more difficult. I need to get my head around how I’m going to hand them over. I just want them to be mine for always.”
In September 2014 Charlton took Ella and Olivia to Paris for a six-week trip. It had always been her dream to take them to Europe to live for a year when they turned 13, to broaden the girls’ outlooks and horizons. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she brought her plans forward.
“A lot of people said we shouldn’t have gone. They said I was crazy. I mean, what person in their right mind takes two four-year-olds to Paris when they’re really, really ill? But it was a very special time and do you know what? Now the girls and I will always have Paris.
“I love the culture of Paris, I love the history. But what I loved most was that when we were there I was just a mum with her kids. No one knew I had cancer and the girls didn’t really mention it.”
The few times they did, they made their mother cry.
“We were at Disneyland and there’s this show where Tinkerbell throws her magic dust across the crowd. Livvy leaned against me and she had this voice that was full of awe and she said, ‘Mummy the magic’s real.’ I said, ‘Yeah I think it is’ and she said, ‘It’s going to make you better’.
“I said, ‘You never know Lulu’. They’re amazing little people. Just their understanding of the world. I think we share an unusual bond as mother and daughters because of it.
“We’re incredibly tight. I also took them to England to show them where my family come from and as we were leaving Westminster Abbey I told Ella to go and see the chair where the queen sits when she gets her crown. She said, ‘I’ll see it next time’. I said ‘We won’t be coming back’. She said ‘No, when I come with my babies. I’m going to come back and I’m going to tell my babies I was here with you Mummy, and you gave me the world.”
To add to the complexity of this situation, Ella has been seriously ill and needed major surgery too. In February 2014, doctors discovered a benign tumour within her inner ear.
The tumour has permanently damaged her hearing and Ella has had three surgeries so far, the most recent in May this year to remove any remaining tumour and place titanium bones in her inner ear to transmit sound.
“She’s really tough and stoical and that’s probably because they’ve been raised in an environment of illness,” Charlton says. “Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, it’s the tight three again. It would be really hard to fit into us.”
In the past three years, Charlton has undergone six operations, including a mastectomy, and six rounds of chemo-therapy to keep her alive. Her cancer has spread to her bones and she is on Tamoxifen, which has prevented the tumour between her shoulder blades from growing.
“Every year they might find something that keeps you alive a little longer, but the treatment is nasty and evil on all sorts of levels. I’d never go through the pain of it every day unless I had the girls. I only do it for them. What’s worked for me is that I responded really well to chemo, and this drug I’m on generally only lasts for 12 months and I’ve been on it two years. It’s not going to keep working forever and I know time is running out because my pain levels are higher.
“I’ve been told it’s best to hand the girls over before I’m too unwell,” she continues. “It’s got to be ‘we’re at our new house and mum really likes it and spends time with us’ and then ‘mum’s sick in hospice’. When it gets to that point, I’ll just refuse treatment and hasten the process. Who would want to live long-term once your kids are somewhere else?
“I’m just quietly gutted I guess. I can remember when I was first diagnosed I said the thing I needed to be there for was when somebody breaks their heart. It needs to be me that snuggles them in bed and eats a cake of chocolate with them. That’s my job. I guess I’m a control freak but it’s those things… It’s hard to hand that stuff over.
They twins turned five recently. Charlton says she always told herself she wanted to live long enough to be there for their first day of school, but when that birthday came round, she couldn’t bring herself to send them. “Because it’s a big thing in a kid’s life,” she explains, “and I’m not going to be alive for the end of it”.
However, Charlton has worked through that resistance, realising if she kept having a negative reaction then they weren’t going to like school, and the twins have now started at their local primary.
In anticipation of all the moments Charlton will not get to experience with her girls, she’s handwritten them letters… there are letters to wish them luck for their exams, to open the night before their weddings, to mark the births of their children.
Charlton returned to university this year to finish her Masters so that Ella and Olivia would be able to attend her graduation ceremony in November. “I’d been really upset that I’d never see them graduate. The university said ‘bring them to yours’.”
Along with the letters, Charlton has ensured every moment of their lives has been documented.
“They’ve got boxes of the clothes they wore on special days, Pandora beads I’ve collected over the years to mark special times in our lives, scrapbooks, photo albums. It’s sort of become an in joke now. Livvy says to me, ‘Oh, you’ll have to record that.'”
Oliver knows that being forgotten is a real fear for her friend and has promised to keep on talking about her with the girls long after she’s gone.
“We’re Mummy’s friends, you see, and that’s what’s going to be very important. We’ve been there from the beginning, from the first IVF appointment. I’ve worked with her. We have photos together. I will know the answers to all the girls’ questions.
“I’ve always tried to be the one who encourages Marina to look ahead, rather than be really scared. And I know it’s easy to say but I like to tell her that she’s going to be ancient.”
And when the time finally comes to hand the girls over, “I tell her she’s got to trust Steve and I. We will always do the best for the girls. What’s most important is that they’re really well loved and feel good about themselves. I’m older at 60 and I know a lot of people are going to say I’m too old. I don’t know what the answer is to that but I think the love you can give a child is more important than how old you are.”
Charlton hopes the couple will give the girls the stability and security they need.
“I like them together. Alone, Steve’s serious and quiet and Rae’s full of joy and frivolity. But together they make a whole and I always thought, whatever happened to the girls, one of them would be ideal to deal with it.
“Ella’s quite loud and we all know what she’s feeling. Livvy’s more reflective and withdrawn.
“So I could imagine Livvy as a 12- or 13-year-old leaning over the bonnet of the car with Steve, and he would give her the time to tell him what was wrong. I could imagine that quietness.
“And I could imagine that Ella would be able to rant and stamp her feet and Rae would get equally as volatile and then they’d have a good laugh and a good cry about it afterwards.
“So I know it all makes perfect sense. And once they’re settled and happy and secure my job is done in this place and I need to leave them to do their job.
“I’ve had a horrendous few years because cancer is a horrendous disease. But shit, I’ve had a wonderful time being a mum. I’ve had an amazing time being a mum.
“My girls are my life,” she concludes.
“They mean everything to me. Nothing beats sitting around the table at the end of the day and hearing those two little people tell me about their day and their great philosophies on life.”
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