A Writing Excersise

My mother’s best friend, Renae Pearlman, was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease 3 years ago. Renae and my mother went through the entirety of their schooling lives side by side, and developed an incredibly strong bond. After my family left Sydney though, it was a struggle for them to stay in touch. My sister and I both loved Renae – she had an extremely extroverted personality and wouldn’t accept anything but a smile on our faces. As I was going through a relatively low point throughout my senior years of high school, struggling with both the workload and no clear life direction after school, Renae received the diagnosis. Mum picked me up from school, and we cried the entire way home – how could something so painful happen to someone so beautiful? Over the next two years, we made regular visits down to Sydney to see her – or rather, watch the disease slowly erode away her quality of life. She eventually became constrained to a wheelchair, she couldn’t eat without help from her husband, and she could barely talk or breathe. My family continued struggling to grasp the idea that she would one day pass away. As a young teenager about to entire adult life, I began to question the point of life as a whole. Why try so hard at things like school and my career, if one day we could be told we only have three years to live? 
What was the point?
My parents wouldn’t accept this mindset though. They used Renae’s situation to drive home the point that we shouldn’t waste a single second of any day. Life is short already, and the fact that it could suddenly become much shorter should only make us appreciate what we have even more. This reignited my passion for art, and I drew a large scale portrait of Renae, submitting it into the Young Archibald held at the NSW Art Gallery.
Renae stayed strong right through until the end, and she passed holding her husbands hand. She is one of my biggest inspirations to this day, and is one of the driving factors behind my passion for the arts, and filmmaking.