I’m Esther. I came to Perth from Korea ten years ago, and for eight of those years I’ve worked with older people in aged care. I studied nursing in Korea but never worked as a nurse. The clinical skills have faded. What stayed is respect for every person, right to the end.

I always thought I was lonely here. I was wrong. The grandmothers and grandfathers who passed through my hands loved me more than I can say. In those quiet hours, they became my mother and my father.

My own father, I lost from a phone screen. He died suddenly during COVID. Our last words were on a video call before his operation, and we couldn’t fly home for his funeral. I never got to tell him, “I understand you now, Dad.”

I won’t make that mistake twice. My mother was born in 1945; I was born in 1975. Thirty years apart, always. We’ve been growing old together all along, two old friends with a generation between us. Now she’s eighty, I’m fifty, and there’s still an ocean in the way. I’ve learned that “later” usually means “too late”.

So I’ve started asking her the questions we never asked. That’s what Dear My Legacy is for: to celebrate a life while the person can still tell it, and to leave it to the family like a film where they are the main character.

With love, Esther