Pushing a shopping trolley down the sparsely stocked aisles in her local supermarket, Lisa Wilkinson is stopped by a sudden thought. “I wonder if Mum needs anything,” she ponders, pulling out her mobile phone and preparing to make a quick call to find out.
It’s then – not for the first time, and certainly far from the last – that the crushing realisation her mother, Beryl, is no longer here hits her afresh. At the age of 89, Beryl lost her battle with cancer close to two years ago. Yet The Project host admits with raw honesty, “I’m still not used to her not being around.”
As she speaks to The Weekly today, that sense of missing her mother is especially keen. For Lisa, now 60, has recently delved deep into her past, filming an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? for SBS, and the litany of tragedies she found there broke her heart.
She discovered a long line of ancestors on her mother’s side who had struggled with unimaginable poverty, abuse and institutionalisation. Generation after generation had been dealt the harshest of blows and while some had come out the other side, others had not.
It was a journey that saw Lisa shed many more tears than she was prepared for. But it led her to more keenly appreciate the incredible resilience Beryl possessed, despite her traumatic start in life.
“And my greatest sadness,” she says now, her voice catching, “is that I can’t share this with my mother. She passed away having so many huge question marks still hanging about who she was, what her background was, what led to her difficult childhood.”
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