A brunette woman, wearing glasses, a pink sweater and holding a mug with the Union Jack, somberly stares out the window of her home. A title is overlaid on top which says ‘To my darlings’.

How do you plan a future for your kids that you might not be part of?

Facing off against cancer, Lauren Murphy wanted to be certain of one thing: that her children would know how hard she tried to stay.

In an ambulance racing through the night, Lauren Murphy tells her husband Antony she loves him. Then she closes her eyes, not knowing if she’ll open them again.

She wakes to a false dawn: she’s alive, but the cancer she was rid of is back — and it’s spread.

Worry is gnawing at her too: worry that she won’t see her son start school, or her daughter graduate. Most of all, she worries about leaving them without their mum.

So she starts documenting: birthdays, hospital appointments, chemo sessions, living room dance parties; so they’ll always know her — and know how much they were loved.

The day she turns 37, Lauren Murphy puts on a novelty hat, a matching pair of glasses and a bow-tie, and leaves the hospital.

Flanked by her family, all of them decked out in the same colour co-ordinated costumes, they form a bright parade through the bland ward corridors: Lauren, husband Antony, Evangeline, 6, and Alfie, 4.

Birthday or not, today Lauren feels “very lucky”.

Two days ago, after she was rushed to hospital, surgeons removed a tumour from the back of her head near the occipital lobe – the area of the brain responsible for visual perception, including colour, form and motion.

It started with another birthday: her husband Antony’s 40th, which they celebrated in the Coromandel with friends. They already knew Lauren’s cancer, which she had been cleared of over a year prior, was back, after doctors found four nodules in her lungs during a routine check-up in June 2021.

Lauren’s husband Antony is in the front-left corner, wearing a green hat, green bowtie and green glasses. He is standing next to Alfie, dressed as Spiderman, who is next to Evangeline, wearing a rainbow hat and suspenders, pink glasses and a ‘Birthday Princess’ tiara. In the background, Lauren is in the middle of two friends, wearing a gold hat, bowtie and necklace.
Antony, Alfie, Evangeline and Lauren are at the beach. The kids are poking their tongues out, while their mum and dad are smiling.

But video-calling a friend at the end of the weekend, Lauren could feel her eyes straining. A bleed caused by the tumour lurking undiscovered in her head caused her symptoms to escalate alarmingly — triggering that late-night ambulance ride, emergency surgery and now, the knowledge the picture has changed considerably.

Behind the celebratory costumes, the fear Lauren had the first time she was diagnosed has returned. She’s leaving hospital for now, but she will be back. She already knows how the days-long chemotherapy sessions will rob her of the energy to talk to her children, or support Antony through his distress.

And she isn’t ready to start “losing my whole personality, my whole sense of being” to the gruelling treatment. “Chemo really kills your soul, not only the cancer.”

Facing the foe a second time, the couple begin recording clips on their phones: immortalising the minutiae of life at home and in the hospital, creating a space for Lauren to diary her innermost thoughts.

WATCH: A typical 'dad joke' delivered by Antony during Lauren's first chemotherapy session takes her a while to catch on to.

advertisement

Advertise with Stuff
Lauren is playing a board game with her children, around the coffee table. Alfie is sitting on her lap and smiling.

Lauren and her children playing board games.

Lauren and her children playing board games.

The cancer grew quietly the first time around. Then 35, Lauren noticed nothing until her left leg swelled up and she developed a small, painful lump in her groin.

She got it checked out, thinking she’d likely pulled a muscle or had a hernia.

But the mass compressing her nerve was more serious: Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. Most common in children and adolescents (just 54 cases of Ewing’s have been diagnosed in people over the age of 30 in New Zealand since 1995) the diagnosis was a “bolt out of the blue”.

Fourteen gruelling fortnightly cycles of chemotherapy, which often required her to be in hospital from Monday to Friday, like a full-time job, shrank the tumour to a point surgeons could remove it entirely. 

After treatment finished in May 2020, she had a really good year - her best yet, her husband says. She spent time with her children, took up open water swimming, and lived a normal life, punctuated only by surveillance appointments every three months.

But Ewing’s is an aggressive and rapidly growing cancer, with a high risk of recurrence. It is difficult to treat and once it comes back, it is harder to get rid of.

Watch the full documentary: To my darlings

The news Lauren’s cancer is back arrives at a time when the Murphy family is brimming with dreams for the future. 

Their applications to become New Zealand citizens are in train, after the couple moved from England in 2013, and they have recently drafted plans to build their forever home on a plot of land in the bush-clad West Auckland suburb of Titirangi. These plans take a backseat as cancer takes centre stage.

Treatment soon becomes all-encompassing, with radiation on Lauren’s brain and cycles of chemotherapy keeping her in a curtained hospital cubicle for 40-hour stretches each time.

Lauren looks down, as Antony cuts her hair. Alfie and Evangeline each pull at her hair, which is falling out.

Treatment is causing Lauren’s hair to thin and fall out, so they shave it off as a family.

Treatment is causing Lauren’s hair to thin and fall out, so they shave it off as a family.

A pile of curly brown hair is on the table.
Evangeline and Alfie look on as their dad cuts their mum’s hair.
A box of human hair wigs.
Lauren is reaching out to feel the texture of a wig.
Lauren and Evangline sit at the table, as Lauren pulls a wig onto her head.
Lauren is holding a mirror, and smiles looking at her reflection.

Facing being bald, Lauren is fitted for a wig.

Facing being bald, Lauren is fitted for a wig.

Item 1 of 7
Lauren looks down, as Antony cuts her hair. Alfie and Evangeline each pull at her hair, which is falling out.

Treatment is causing Lauren’s hair to thin and fall out, so they shave it off as a family.

Treatment is causing Lauren’s hair to thin and fall out, so they shave it off as a family.

A pile of curly brown hair is on the table.
Evangeline and Alfie look on as their dad cuts their mum’s hair.
A box of human hair wigs.
Lauren is reaching out to feel the texture of a wig.
Lauren and Evangline sit at the table, as Lauren pulls a wig onto her head.
Lauren is holding a mirror, and smiles looking at her reflection.

Facing being bald, Lauren is fitted for a wig.

Facing being bald, Lauren is fitted for a wig.

Lauren looks down, as Antony cuts her hair. Alfie and Evangeline each pull at her hair, which is falling out.

Treatment is causing Lauren’s hair to thin and fall out, so they shave it off as a family.

Treatment is causing Lauren’s hair to thin and fall out, so they shave it off as a family.

A pile of curly brown hair is on the table.
Evangeline and Alfie look on as their dad cuts their mum’s hair.
A box of human hair wigs.
Lauren is reaching out to feel the texture of a wig.
Lauren and Evangline sit at the table, as Lauren pulls a wig onto her head.
Lauren is holding a mirror, and smiles looking at her reflection.

Facing being bald, Lauren is fitted for a wig.

Facing being bald, Lauren is fitted for a wig.

Item 1 of 7
Lauren looks down, as Antony cuts her hair. Alfie and Evangeline each pull at her hair, which is falling out.

Treatment is causing Lauren’s hair to thin and fall out, so they shave it off as a family.

Treatment is causing Lauren’s hair to thin and fall out, so they shave it off as a family.

A pile of curly brown hair is on the table.
Evangeline and Alfie look on as their dad cuts their mum’s hair.
A box of human hair wigs.
Lauren is reaching out to feel the texture of a wig.
Lauren and Evangline sit at the table, as Lauren pulls a wig onto her head.
Lauren is holding a mirror, and smiles looking at her reflection.

Facing being bald, Lauren is fitted for a wig.

Facing being bald, Lauren is fitted for a wig.

Antony visits daily on his way to and from work, armed with homemade soup they bought a second chest freezer to house. A framed family photo travels with her to hospital each time, to sit at her bedside.

Chemo makes her feel “rotten” – like she’s been hit with a bad hangover. She’s queasy, anaemic and bone-tired. Her hair is beginning to fall out. Huddled around their dining table, Alfie and Evangeline’s tiny hands pull loose tufts of curls, squealing gleefully, as the electric razor hums against Lauren’s scalp.

But she’s resolute in continuing treatment.

I want to get better. I’m determined that the time that I have, whatever that is, is good. LAUREN

The kids know Mum is sick and taking medicine to get better. Before hospital visits they draw pictures for Lauren to take with her, and form a makeshift assembly line to help bundle up her medication and supplements. 

She maintains a cautious lightness around them: keeping life as normal as possible. Lauren’s mum and dad are here from her native England to help parent Alfie and Evangeline when she struggles. Their school-run and dinnertime routines remain, even when she’s not there to tuck them in. Sobering conversations happen behind closed doors, or after bedtime.

The treatment is so strong that, by the third cycle, she needs two units of blood to help boost her back to baseline. It’s a relentless cycle – feeling terrible, followed by mentally preparing to feel terrible. But she’s buoyed by the fact that scans show the chemotherapy is working on the tumours in her lungs.

advertisement

Advertise with Stuff
Lauren is walking down the corridor of a hospital ward, holding a pole which her chemotherapy treatment hangs from, and a jug of water.

Lauren is undergoing four rounds of chemotherapy for the tumours in her lungs, after having radiation and surgery on her brain.

Lauren is undergoing four rounds of chemotherapy for the tumours in her lungs, after having radiation and surgery on her brain.

Lauren has surgery in September 2021 to remove two nodules in her left lung, with Auckland in the grip of a level 4 lockdown triggered by the Delta outbreak.

As she prepares to head to hospital, she and Antony joke that at least Lauren will have lots of downtime to shop online. She counters that as she’ll struggle sitting up post-surgery, their bank account will be safe. 

Surgery is successful, but surgeons have to remove a nerve the cancer is wrapped around, leaving her with difficulty breathing due to reduced mobility in her diaphragm.

Lauren has just woken up after lung surgery.

Lauren just awake after lung surgery.

Lauren just awake after lung surgery.

Lauren’s final round of chemotherapy is scheduled two years to the week after her first diagnosis. Folding clothes into a suitcase for hospital, Lauren is optimistic it will be the last chemotherapy she ever does.

What she’s endured has been “almost too much to comprehend”.

“I used to think I was just unfeeling, but I suspect that’s my coping mechanism, is to just kind of let it be happening to somebody else”.

If you can distance yourself a little bit from it, I think that has helped me. LAUREN

After her final bout of chemo and follow-up scans, Lauren’s oncologist requests to see her in person.      

“I was kind of prepared that things might not all be good news,” Lauren says. 

The nodules in her right lung have disappeared, and everything on the left side looks promising following surgery. News about her head, however, is not so positive.

A new 0.5mm tumour has formed just outside the field of radiation of the first tumour. 

In between home-schooling, lockdown baking sessions and bedroom dance parties, the family arranges appointments for a second round of brain surgery and further radiation.

In a bed in hospital, Lauren reads a book. She has a hot drink, water, her phone and a wheat bag on a tray in front of her.

Lauren spends a whole week in hospital for treatment each time, with chemo running for 40 hours.

Lauren spends a whole week in hospital for treatment each time, with chemo running for 40 hours.

A clear plaster is stuck to Lauren’s chest, over the port her chemotherapy drugs go into.

Chemo drugs go into a port in her chest.

Chemo drugs go into a port in her chest.

A black bag full of chemotherapy hangs off a metal pole.

Treatment makes Lauren feel ‘rubbish’, like she has a bad hangover.

Treatment makes Lauren feel ‘rubbish’, like she has a bad hangover.

Item 1 of 3
In a bed in hospital, Lauren reads a book. She has a hot drink, water, her phone and a wheat bag on a tray in front of her.

Lauren spends a whole week in hospital for treatment each time, with chemo running for 40 hours.

Lauren spends a whole week in hospital for treatment each time, with chemo running for 40 hours.

A clear plaster is stuck to Lauren’s chest, over the port her chemotherapy drugs go into.

Chemo drugs go into a port in her chest.

Chemo drugs go into a port in her chest.

A black bag full of chemotherapy hangs off a metal pole.

Treatment makes Lauren feel ‘rubbish’, like she has a bad hangover.

Treatment makes Lauren feel ‘rubbish’, like she has a bad hangover.

In a bed in hospital, Lauren reads a book. She has a hot drink, water, her phone and a wheat bag on a tray in front of her.

Lauren spends a whole week in hospital for treatment each time, with chemo running for 40 hours.

Lauren spends a whole week in hospital for treatment each time, with chemo running for 40 hours.

A clear plaster is stuck to Lauren’s chest, over the port her chemotherapy drugs go into.

Chemo drugs go into a port in her chest.

Chemo drugs go into a port in her chest.

A black bag full of chemotherapy hangs off a metal pole.

Treatment makes Lauren feel ‘rubbish’, like she has a bad hangover.

Treatment makes Lauren feel ‘rubbish’, like she has a bad hangover.

Item 1 of 3
In a bed in hospital, Lauren reads a book. She has a hot drink, water, her phone and a wheat bag on a tray in front of her.

Lauren spends a whole week in hospital for treatment each time, with chemo running for 40 hours.

Lauren spends a whole week in hospital for treatment each time, with chemo running for 40 hours.

A clear plaster is stuck to Lauren’s chest, over the port her chemotherapy drugs go into.

Chemo drugs go into a port in her chest.

Chemo drugs go into a port in her chest.

A black bag full of chemotherapy hangs off a metal pole.

Treatment makes Lauren feel ‘rubbish’, like she has a bad hangover.

Treatment makes Lauren feel ‘rubbish’, like she has a bad hangover.

The odds don’t look great and Lauren is wrestling a raft of emotions.

“I’ve felt really mad, really frustrated. I've done all this treatment and still it has grown. But I know that won’t get me anywhere.”

In the video diaries she records on cynical days, she wonders whether the slow pace at which the system is moving is because there’s little anyone can do, so she’s not a top priority any more.

She just wants the tumour out. The more she ruminates, the more it seems like she can feel it growing — the more pain she feels in her head, the greater the pressure behind her eyes.

As her own energy depletes, the kids buzz with an endless supply of it. Days are filled playing zoos, solving squabbles, and going for walks to the “iceblock shop”. 

The Delta outbreak is wreaking havoc on surgical lists but a few weeks later Lauren gets a date: November 10. She’s grateful for the time lockdown has given her with her family.

Fluid on Lauren’s lung hampers her recovery after brain surgery, but a flurry of tests and scans don’t suggest it’s cancerous.

Then her condition suddenly deteriorates. Antony packs an overnight bag to sleep by her side that night. They phone and video call loved ones on the other side of the world to say raw, tough goodbyes.

“That was the first time the dialogue had changed from, ‘We’re going to do all we can, it’s all positive, we've got a clear plan,’ to, ‘We don’t know how this is going to swing. This is going to be a tough night to few days,’” she says.

Lauren is weak and hooked up to at least two units of blood a day. The mass on her lung keeps growing, but they hold out hope it is just a bleed – surely cancer can’t possibly grow that fast?

This time, test results look suspicious. Within days they know it’s cancer. The disease has spread to the cells in the cavity surrounding the lung. It suddenly has a pathway everywhere and is incurable.

Lauren’s wig sits on her dresser, surrounded by family photos, makeup brushes, a mirror, and a bouquet of flowers.

As she gets sicker, Lauren’s wig sits idle on her bedroom dresser.

As she gets sicker, Lauren’s wig sits idle on her bedroom dresser.

Lauren believes it is harder for doctors to convey this to her than it is to hear: “Once you’ve had it the first time around, then they tell you it’s in your lungs, then it’s in your head.

You think, ‘Well, this isn’t going to go well, is it?’ LAUREN

Antony mirrors her wry reaction. “When you start off on this journey, you think, ‘We’ve beaten it once, we’ll beat it again,’” he says. “But you know what a brutal cancer it can be.”

Sapped of energy and plagued by pain, Lauren wonders if she will make it to Christmas. 

Propped up in her hospital bed, she holds a letter in one shaking hand and films a video on her phone with the other. “To my darlings, Evangeline and Alfie: You both mean the world to me, more than anything,” she reads, her voice cracking.

“I never ever want to leave you. I really thought that we would have more time together, and it’s so unfair that we don’t.” Wiping tears from her cheeks, she tells them it isn’t their fault, or hers. That she has worked so hard to stay. 

One more December 25 dawns. Alfie and Evangline snuggle sleepily with Lauren in bed before the excitement of a living room full of presents proves irresistible. She gets dressed up for the occasion, and perches gingerly on the couch to play board games and read them books: breathless, but grateful to be able to participate in a day she didn't think she would see.

advertisement

Advertise with Stuff
Lauren sits in a bed from hospice, wearing a pink and red robe and white compression stockings on her legs. She looks at Antony as he speaks.

Lauren and Antony sit and talk in a bed she’s been provided by hospice.

Lauren and Antony sit and talk in a bed she’s been provided by hospice.

By late January, she’s frail and her limbs are swollen. She’s slower to move; her softened speech punctuated by short gasps. Her partially collapsed left lung is barely working, causing pressure and pain in her chest which makes it difficult to breathe normally. 

The family has lost sense of time, even as they desperately want more of it, Antony says. Days bleed into one another, broken up by nurse visits and the mundane tasks that keep daily life going. 

A wheelchair has shown up from hospice. Plans are made to get Lauren out to a local cafe in it, the kids scootering alongside her. The calendar for early February still holds optimistic reminders of scan appointments for her brain and chest, which will indicate the next course of treatment.

Antony holds a piece of paper which says ‘Welcome home’ and has a drinks and food menu for Lauren to choose from. It includes eggs, beef, icecream, fruit and biscuits.

Evangeline and Alfie have drawn up a menu for their mum now that she’s out of hospice care. But by now, she has very little appetite.

Evangeline and Alfie have drawn up a menu for their mum now that she’s out of hospice care. But by now, she has very little appetite.

Meanwhile, the couple’s conversation seesaws between light and dark, as they joke about how Antony must learn to do school lunch prep, how he might navigate future sleepovers as a one-parent household. They’re mapping out a life without her.

And they wonder now whether they’ve told the kids enough — whether they understand that Mum is never getting better.

Trips out to the section where the house is being built, the children standing in what will one day be their bedrooms, have taken on a bittersweet tinge, as Antony is left to contemplate the prospect of moving into the home he and Lauren designed together, without her. 

Though it is little more than bricks, dirt and a freshly poured concrete floor for now, “it’s beautiful, it really feels like a holiday every time you go out there,” Antony says. “It will be a really special place to raise the children.” 

They’ve “thrown the kitchen sink” at Lauren’s cancer, “but you always cling to that bit of hope, that you catch a lucky break”, Antony, a self-described glass-half-full person, says.

We just want more time. ANTONY

Two days later, on the morning of January 27, 2022, Lauren dies at home with Antony, Alfie, Evangeline and her parents Sharon and Ian with her.

In the weeks beforehand, she expresses her one hope: that through the videos, photos and letters she leaves behind, her children will know how hard she fought to stay with them and that she had a good life while she was here. 

“For me it [documenting] was always about doing something that left a bit of a legacy – whatever that is.” 

She wants them to remember evenings spent dancing together barefoot on the hardwood floors of their home, dinners and board games around the dining room table, silly jokes and raucous laughter shared; that they were more loved than they could know.

Evangeline is swinging on a rope swing at the park.
Alfie leans over to pat Roddy, their Spoodle puppy. Both Alfie and Roddy are smiling.
Alfie and Evangeline are smiling from inside a fabric play tunnel.
Evangeline is swinging on a rope swing at the park.

“I want them to know me… The things they don’t get to ask you. The things we don’t ask each other.” 

She wants people to know it’s OK to talk about cancer, how they feel about it, and for people not to suffer in silence or isolation. That we should tell people what they mean to us while we still have them.

She hopes she won’t be part of that silence — that her family share stories about her life and that it isn’t too painful to think about her.

And she hopes that one day they will move on. That Antony, who she met after strolling into a bar to ask for a job 19 years ago, isn’t left alone with half of his life still ahead of him. 

It’s been a good life, she says. So many people have a worse hand.

I’m just gutted that I won’t be around for all the milestones, and life in general. LAUREN

Lauren lives on in framed photos lining the walls of the Murphys’ home, in the stories her parents, siblings, and husband continue to share. In the marathon she booked for Antony to do in November – a 40th birthday present deferred due to Covid-19. 

She also survives through a fundraiser Antony has set up in tribute to her – raising money for Auckland Health Foundation’s Rise scholarship, a programme supporting nursing and midwifery students. They aim to raise $30,000, a years’ worth of support for 10 students, to repay the support they received. They’ve raised more than $21,300 to date.

Antony views the days and weeks after Lauren’s cancer returned as a “bonus”. “I thought she was gone that Sunday night [in June].”

Until it was deemed incurable, they always believed she would beat cancer again, he says. “Even past that point, you’re in that miracle phase, you’re hoping for some divine intervention.”

In the weeks and months after Lauren’s death, Antony continues to reflect on the woman she was: theirs was a “true love story”.

He will remember her as a wonderful person and mother who shaped her children into wonderful people; who touched hearts and minds the world over. “You’d be hard-pressed to find someone with a bad word about Lauren,” he says.

While documenting her cancer was part of her story, her life and its impact was so much greater, he says.

“The legacy that gets left, I suppose, is love.”

So live for me,laugh and try new things, be brave and be honest with yourselves. LAUREN
WORDS Hannah Martin
VISUALS Ryan Anderson
DESIGN AND LAYOUT Kathryn George
EDITORS Natalie Crockett and Kate Newton

Projects like this take time and resources. Please become a Stuff supporter and help enable this type of work.

Getting to the truth takes patience and perseverance. Our reporters will spend days combing through documents, weeks cultivating delicate sources, and months – if not years – fighting through the Official Information Act, courts and red tape to deliver their stories.

By supporting Stuff you'll help our journalists keep the pressure on. Make a contribution from as little as $1 today.

Support Stuff's journalism today