The Size of a Life

On grief, gratitude, and what it means to honour your own life when you have stood next to larger ones.

Not my usual fortnightly piece. I wrote it after Neale Daniher's funeral, and it would not keep.

He was the coach who gave me my start in the game. Neale Daniher. For a few weeks now, I have been listening to him, not for the first time, but differently since he died in May, the way you start to listen to a man once he can no longer answer back. He never gave me many words. One day in the 2000 season, he walked over at training, that country husk in his voice, and said, Big fella, you’re going well. That was most of it. Written down, it looks like nothing. But it was the line that let me believe I could be a senior regular ruckman, and I have carried it for most of my adult life.

In the 2000 Grand Final, I was carried from the ground on a stretcher, in front of a hundred thousand people and a television audience past counting. The body has its own way of reminding you that nothing at that height lasts. I went on to Fremantle for three years, then Richmond for six. I never knew Daniher the way others did, never played under him for as long. It was a spark though. A spark from the right man at the right moment can light a whole decade.

Long after football, he had become something far larger than a coach: the face of a fight against motor neurone disease that raised more than a hundred million dollars, the man who sent a whole country sliding into the ice, the one who took his own long dying and turned it into something close to a gift. He grew to the size of the country.

They held his funeral at the MCG last week, a state service on the same ground where he had once coached me. More than a thousand people came. I sat among men I had played beside, old Melbourne teammates, faces gone grey, all of us there for the one man. And in the middle of it, with no logic to it at all, my mother arrived in my thoughts. Her anniversary had fallen only days before, the seventh of June. She came the way our dead do when another death cracks the door.

She died in 2020. Pancreatic cancer. It gave us six months. The last of them went to the fade and the morphine, so that she was gone from the conversation a while before she was gone. She was the one who believed in the thing before there was any evidence for it. A boy says he wants to play football at the highest level, and most of the world, gently or not, files it under unlikely. She did not. She drove, she waited, she stayed. The dream came true, completely, twelve years of it, and she was there for it. She was in the stands that Grand Final day, and she watched her son being carried from the field on a stretcher, close enough to see it and too far to do anything but watch. Belief and helplessness in one afternoon.

Sitting there, I noticed what happens in me when I hold these two at once. Daniher’s magnitude. My mother’s belief. I feel small. Not worthless. Small. As though my own life, the work I actually do, barely registers next to a man who moved a nation and a woman who gave me everything she had. The work is real. It is also, by most measures, out there but not mainstream. I am not on the big stage. I am in a studio and a dojo, mentoring boys and men through movement and conversation, week after week, doing the slow work that does not announce itself.

The word itself did not come from me. A few days had passed, enough for a little perspective, and I was still in the middle of all of it. Daniher's death and my mother's life folding into one another. I was talking with a friend, a woman who teaches me things, a conversation that went a layer deeper than either of us planned. The word honour came through. Not as advice. More like something she noticed and set down between us. And the moment she did, I knew exactly where I had felt it most.

One of the young men I worked with met my mother once, near the start, when the diagnosis was still new. He was eighteen at the time. After that single meeting, he wrote her a letter that I still keep today. He told her he had been honoured to meet her, and that he would go on to become the best he could be. Near the end, in the palliative ward, I read it to her aloud whilst she was still responsive. I hadn’t been moved to tears like that since sitting beside her in pallative care.

Over the past week I have been turning the word over since. What does it actually mean to honour oneself? We treat the phrase with suspicion. It sounds soft, or vain, or like something you buy. Most of us were taught that attending to your own worth is the first step toward selfishness, so we skip it, and then we call the skipping humility. I am no longer sure that is what humility is.

Here is what I am beginning to see. Honouring yourself is not the opposite of feeling small. It is what lets you stand next to something enormous without disappearing. Daniher never needed me to become large. My mother did not love a future version of me. They honoured the life that was actually there, the ordinary one, the one still working itself out. And if they could do that for me, the real question is whether I can learn to do it for myself.

Because honour moves in an order. You receive it before you can give it. Someone honours you before you have done anything to deserve it: a parent, a coach, a teacher who sees something and decides to back it. That is what my mother did, and what Daniher did in his way. Then, if you are fortunate, you spend years giving it forward. I do this now without always naming it. A boy walks into the studioor dojo still wearing the week on his shoulders, the jaw set, the eyes somewhere else, and before he has shown me anything, before he has earned a single thing, I treat him as though he is worth the full weight of my attention. In the dojo the bow comes first, to someone who has done nothing yet to earn it. I honour him first. That is the whole method, if there is one.

What I am slow to learn is the last movement. After you have received it, and after you have spent years giving it away, you are meant to turn it back on yourself. To honour the one doing the giving. I watch it in the men I work with, and I know it in myself. We were backed once. We back everyone now, the teams, the children, the people who lean on us. And we struggle to turn the same regard on our own lives without flinching, as though it were an indulgence we had not earned.

It does not help that we now live inside machines built to confuse the matter. Social media has taken the word honour and swapped it for the word seen. We are told that to value a life is to display it, to gather an audience for the living rather than to do the living. So honouring the self curdles into performing the self, and because performance never fills the hole it promises to fill, men can arrive in front of me exhausted by a visibility that has nothing to do with worth. The remedy is not more of it. It is the opposite. It is the willingness to value a life that almost no one is watching.

This is why I have made a kind of peace with the work staying out of the spotlight. Not mainstream. For a long time, I read that as a verdict on its value. I am starting to read it differently. The room of boys and men is not a smaller version of the big stage. It is a different thing entirely, and it asks a different kind of honour: the sort you give and receive when no one is keeping score.

Daniher spent his last years dying in full public view and somehow made even that an act of generosity. My mother gave in to one boy in private, and the world never noticed. Both of them honoured a life. Neither needed that life to be large.

That, I think, is what I am still learning to live. To honour my own life at the scale it actually is. Not in remembrance, one day. In attention, now. To stand near the giants without vanishing, and near the quiet ones without apologising.

Honour the life you are actually living. It is the one they backed.