My Journey To The Light

Elly Symons lost her 27-year-old son, Samuel, to brain cancer last year. She talks exclusively with Michael Sheather about Samuel’s resilience in the face of death and her path through grief to healing.

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It’s cold in the chapel. Outside, the November sun is slowly warming the morning air, but inside the tiny 19th Century stone-walled church, the temperature is still wintry and likely to stay that way for at least a few hours. Sitting by the door is a woman, a mother who recently lost her adult son to an aggressive form of brain cancer. She stands up, takes a small votive candle from a nearby table and walks to an altar set in the wall of the chapel. She lights the candle and bows her head in silent prayer.

The woman is Elly Symons, a Melbourneborn mother of three boys who she raised with their father, her now estranged husband, entertainer Red Symons.

“Samuel’s whole life was complicated,” says Elly. “It happened when he was diagnosed at four and it was an ongoing dance that we did together for a very long time – until last year, when things took a turn for the worse.”

At the heart of this story is the relationship between a mother and her gravely ill son, a bond that only those who have lived through it can really understand. Elly has never spoken publicly before about Samuel’s death. As the estranged wife of a high-profile celebrity, Elly chose to stay out of the spotlight, but feels now that it is time for her to tell her story.

“Some time needed to pass to take the rawness out of what actually happened,” explains Elly, who was also going through a complicated and distressing separation from the boys’ father at the time Samuel discovered the tumour that finally claimed his life.

A story of courage

Elly begins her story when Samuel was just four. “Samuel was a perfectly healthy little boy,”

her first thought when she got up in the morning and it stayed with her throughout the day.