'The bedroom light was flicked on, and a voice said "Your mother's gone".'

The telephone call came not long after midnight. It was the hospital. It was time. So, I was woken and bundled out of my warm, cosy bed to be taken to my father’s brother’s home.

I clearly remember saying ‘I don’t want to go there. I hate them.’ but to no avail. Instead I was driven in the family Valiant through the chilly night and placed in the scrunchy, uncomfortable bed of my relatives and returned to sleep. Sometime before dawn the single globe in the bedroom was flicked on. Too soon my hazy, sleep muddled head was filled with the words ‘Your mother’s gone’. And that was it. Words which echo like yesterday.

It was Easter Sunday 1977.

Later that morning, as homemade chocolate Easter eggs were handed around the morose household, I wanted the keys to the family car. If my mother was dead I wanted to see if she was in the boot. I was seven years old. I hadn’t been allowed to go to my beloved grandmother’s funeral two years earlier. So, I had no idea what happened to recently deceased people. Why couldn’t they be brought home by the family? Why wouldn’t my mother be in the Valiant’s boot? Eventually, after I stacked on a turn, I was taken outside into the wet morning to the car. Of course she wasn’t in there. Days had passed since I’d seen her in the hospital. Now she was gone, forever. Never to be seen again.

It’s now 40 years since my 30-year-old mother lost her short yet brave battle with cancer. Acute Myeloid Leukaemia, or AML. She had finally been diagnosed in December 1976 yet by April 1977 she was dead. Four months, if that.

When you’re seven years old you miss your Mummy. The happy face in the tuck shop with a sausage roll and a chocolate milk. Or surprising you with a special homemade lunch at the class room door. Adventures to the Art Gallery of South Australia or to the Children’s Library on Kintore Avenue or to the South Australian Museum or trips in the clunky gated lifts at the John Martin’s department store. Or endless rides on the whiny Red Hen railcars which made up Adelaide’s train system.

But as an adult it’s the big things where you really feel the emptiness. Certainly, my teenage success working at Fairfax’s 5DN - which Mum’s parents had switched on 24/7 - would have pleased her. After all Mum had convinced, possibly begged, the producers of SAS 10’s Romper Room to cast energetic and inquisitive toddler me in their tv kindergarten. Two years of running around under the hot lights of the Gilberton studios gave me a very early insight and taste of mainstream media.

Career successes. Life successes. Ups and downs. Moving from Adelaide to Brisbane to Melbourne to London to Melbourne to Sydney to Canberra to Sydney to Canberra to Sydney to Canberra and then home to Melbourne. Phew. Or meeting the darling man who became my husband yet from whom I’m now divorced. But, like me, who would have loved him for his warmth and his mind and his love.

Mum, gone as her young life was really just beginning. Gone too soon.

Women like Mum gave up their career when she had me. She was desperately lonely – her close family lived in a coastal suburb on the opposite side of town. Her marriage was desperately unhappy. Trapped within suffocating Catholic expectations and restrictions divorce was both impossible and scandalous. Yet for the most part, until I went to school, she was effectively separated as we lived with her parents unless she was required at home with my father.

Then, after her intensely religious mother died in 1975, a secret meeting. After puzzling over it for decades I now believe it was with a divorce lawyer. The highly polished black and white linoleum tiles. His big, heavy wooden desk. The dramatic old city building. Five-year-old me given the sternest and most impassioned plea to please, please sit still and be very quiet during her tearful conversation.

A conversation involving endless boxes of tissues and steaming cups of tea from his shocked secretary. If I was good we could go to The Buttery café at John Martin’s and I could have anything I wanted. Anything. Just please sit still and be quiet. Mum often cried at home. Sometimes it was more of a gut moving howl. It all makes sense now.

One day she had collapsed on the polished wooden floorboards in the hall, her brown sleeveless paisley dress absolutely sodden with tears. Toddler me rubbing her back, smelling her always immaculately coiffed ginger hair pungent with Ellnet hair spray, saying ‘It will be alright Mummy’. It wouldn’t.

For two years, amid the turmoil of her marriage, she had become progressively more unwell. Visits to her male GP resulted in a gentle tap on the hand and a ‘reassurance’ that her problems were simply ‘women’s problems’ and she just needed to take more iron tablets. She was probably anaemic. Probably. Menorrhagia, a hyperactive son, a quiet daughter, marital issues and the mourning of her mother were all to be fixed by iron tablets. She was just run down. There was nothing wrong. She was just being over emotional.

Tucked away in her FoI’d medical file the truth of Mum’s last two years unfolds. When I began the search her hospital could not explain the miraculous decision to microfiche and save her records. Ordinarily the paper file would have been tossed out after a specified time and for those records that had been scanned to film that film would have been disposed of years ago. Lucky me. It reads like the most emotional novel ever written. Except it is all seeringly true.

Apart from a couple of redacted spaces it is the story of a young woman battling the medical system for answers. Literally pleading for help. Constantly being sent away by her male GP. Blood tests not taken until late in 1976 when her condition was close to terminal. When she could barely move and bled so profusely after a routine visit to the dentist.

Tests which, finally, revealed all. Cancer.

Blood transfusions. Tests. More tests. Bone marrow searches and a debate as to whether her children would be subjected to the same search agenda in the hope of finding a match and possibly a cure. Blood transfusions. More and more blood transfusions. A desperate and fast gamble – my words – to try and beat history. To try and turn back the clock. To scramble and try to find a life for a young woman trapped by her crumbling health and her empty marriage where love had left a long time ago. If it was ever there to begin with.

I don’t write this because I miss my Mum, because I do. I don’t write this because she endured a bitterly unhappy marriage, although she did. And I don’t write this because the medical system failed her, even though in my opinion it did. An earlier diagnosis and a more inquisitive GP certainly may have given her more time, more optimism and a better chance at happiness. More time but not a lot of time.

Instead I write this because a vibrant, respected and well-loved young woman died far too early, when her life was only just beginning. When there was so much to live for. When there was so much ahead of her in the tsunami of change brought by the Don Dunstan era and Gough Whitlam’s ‘no fault divorce’ changes of 1975. When a career was more possible after children.

I have never wanted to be a biological parent but I did want to co-parent with my husband. As I often say, covered by jest, I’m great with children but terrible with adults. And at 47 it’s probably too late anyway. I would have loved to be for our kids the person my Mum was for me. Over my life I have watched with love and interest and concern as my friends and work colleagues have had babies. Because I started work so young those babies are now parents. All have raised beautiful, strong and respectful human beings – both in partnerships and alone.

In the short seven years of my life with Mum she taught me resilience and strength and persistence. Even though she physically, emotionally and mentally struggled unknowingly into the last two years of her life she never once gave up. Never. Her tears were real and they were undoubtedly a release from the overwhelming frustration and sickness that stayed with her all day, every day. The constant tiredness. The lack of energy. The shortness of breath. The later inability to pick up her children for a cuddle or a piggy back.

Her bravest moment came when her specialist brought in tow a phalanx of medical students to her bedside. Here he bluntly told her and the assembled crowd ‘You are going to die, Mrs Heslop.’ And that was that. As she collapsed, hysterically, a social worker was called who noted, before she was sedated, that Mum’s steely concern was what was to become of her children. With the unhappiness of her failing marriage an agreement was reached that her extended family would step up. As she faced imminent death her certainty, her belief, was that her children would be very well cared for. Yet that was never to be.

When I later met them as an adult her extended family and school friends described us as ‘the disappeared’. My father remarried to a woman he had ostensibly never met before - less than six months after Mum’s death. I would need the resilience and the strength and the persistence she had shown me because it was to be horrific. In 2013 as an Australia Day Ambassador to the Northern Territory I publicly spoke about it for the first time. Our national theme that year was ‘Thank You, Australia’ and I am thankful.

Very thankful without other adults stepping up for teenage me, stepping in, my life could easily have been side-tracked by drugs and crime and anger-related violence. But because Mum taught me resilience and strength and persistence I am extremely lucky to be the person I am today. It got me through circumstances no adult would wish on any child.

As I sit and write this fond memories and experiences flow backwards. 40 years is a long time. It’s a long time to be without someone. It’s a long time to be without your Mum. I miss her. And if you’d known her you’d miss her, too.

Thanks for everything, Mum. You were the best.

Andrew Heslop is a social entrepreneur and a keynote speaker. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and SoundCloud.