When everything started happening, Donna Meek didn’t really get time to stop and think about it.
Her first thought was her kids.
“All I could think about was how I was going to support my kids here in Australia, and one on the other side of the world,” she said. “I didn’t know how I was going to tell them … or how I was going to stay consistent in all of their lives.”
It didn’t all happen at once. It just kept building.
It started with her dad.
After two strokes, he ended up in a wheelchair, and everything changed. For Donna, the hardest part wasn’t just what happened, but what came after. The uncertainty, and the long recovery process.
“It was hard to see him like that,” she said. “You don’t know what’s next.”
She became a big part of that recovery, watching him slowly try to rebuild the life he had before.
“You’re watching someone start from scratch again,” she said. “That’s really hard.”
But it wasn’t just the slow progress that stayed with her; it was the setbacks.
“There was an accident in the hospital,” she said. “The wheelchair broke, and he ended up hurting himself even more. That really stayed with me.”
It made everything feel fragile.
Like things could go backwards at any moment.
And while she was dealing with that, something else hit.
Her ex-husband was diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease, neuronal migration disorder (NMD). Again, her first thought wasn’t about herself, it was about her children.
“My first reaction was ‘How I was going to tell my kids?’” she said. “How do you explain what that means for them?”
She carried that weight quietly at first.
“I cried. I wondered why it happened,” she said. “And I worried … especially for my son.”
Telling her children was one of the hardest things she had to do.
“The hardest conversation was what was next for them,” she said. “Knowing his life might be cut short.”
Even then, she felt like she couldn’t fall apart.
“I felt like I had to stay strong for my kids,” she said, “even when I felt overwhelmed.”
At the same time, her daughter was in the United States.
The distance made everything harder: time zones, limited contact and trying to protect her from what was happening back home.
“It was so hard when she was away,” Donna said. “I didn’t want to put everything on her when she had her own life going on.”
But eventually, it became too much to manage from a distance.
She made the decision to bring her daughter home.
“The thought of my daughter coming back home kept me going” she said.
When she finally returned, it changed things.
“I felt revived,” Donna said.
Not because everything was fixed, but because she wasn’t carrying everything alone anymore.
For her son, the time was just as overwhelming, even if he didn’t always say it out loud.
He later reflected that everything felt like it was happening at once, and that it was hard to fully understand what was going on at the time. But one thing he did notice
was his mum, how she kept everything moving, even when it was clearly difficult.
He described her as the one who “never stopped” even when things were at their hardest.
And that’s what stands out about this time in Donna Meek’s life.
Not just everything that happened, but how she handled it.
She didn’t have control over the situation.
But she kept showing up anyway.
