Mel Symons 'MY DAUGHTER KEPT ME GOING'

AFTER LOSING HER OWN MUM IN A TRAGIC ACCIDENT, THE TV HOST IS SPREADING AWARENESS ABOUT A RARELY TALKED-ABOUT DANGER

- Sara Tapia

This upcoming Mother’s Day, which falls on May 14, will be a bittersweet time for Melanie Symons, just as it is every year. The Aussie television presenter, 48, had only just welcomed her daughter, Alexandra, into the world in 2016 when she lost her own mother, Robyn, tragically and unexpectedly. “Mum’s birthday was early May as well, so it’s always a hard time as her birthday and Mother’s Day come up,” the Sydney Weekender host tells WHO.

When Alexandra was just a few months old, Symons was struck down with the flu, and Robyn insisted on travelling to her daughter’s home in Byron Bay to lend a hand. “We’d all had dinner and we went upstairs to go to bed,” Symons remembers of the night. “[Alexandra’s dad, Scott, and I] were just cleaning our teeth and then we heard a terrible noise and I thought it was Mum snoring initially.”

It was then that Symons found her mother bleeding and in unimaginable pain, having tripped and fallen down a flight of stairs. “We lost Mum the next day,” she tells us. “And we never returned to that house, because it was too traumatic for us to go back.”

The next few months were spent trying to find a new home while raising a newborn and also grappling with her grief. Symons threw herself into work, which provided her some “relief” from the trauma, and her television career continued to thrive. But behind the scenes, she was still reeling from her loss.