With these words Donna Reeves announced to the world the cruel and heart-breaking news that the love of her life Caroline Roessler had died.
The sadness that has ensued has engulfed The Weekly’s office especially. Caroline was a major player in Australian magazine journalism. She was Managing Editor here for eight years, taking the Editor’s chair in 2002 when Editor-In-Chief Deborah Thomas was on maternity leave. One of Caroline’s triumphs in her time at The Weekly was to negotiate our first ever cover with Oprah Winfrey. The issue was a best-seller.
Caroline left The Weekly to become Editor of Notebook magazine and as with everything she did, gave the title her all, personally running its website, launching craft workshops and much more. When Notebook closed the devoted readers started a ‘Bring Back Notebook’ Facebook campaign.
It was then that Caroline and Donna made their tree change back to South Australia where they had both met working on newspapers, to take on a vineyard and farm in the Barossa. But Caroline wasn’t done with journalism and with Wendy Harmer and Jane Waterhouse founded The Hoopla, a website aimed at 40+ women with a unique feisty voice.
Caroline was an exceptional journalist, a powerful presence in women’s magazines with a rare nose for a story. Her passion was telling Australian stories, unlocking the inspiration in the lives of real people and it shone through everything she did.
As it turned out it was her own life story that has affected us all so deeply. Last October, weeks after she had taken up a new role as Editor at Barossa Living magazine, Caroline was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. It really was a bolt from the blue. Caroline, 52, was in great health and told everyone she was sure it was all a mistake. It wasn’t and before she knew it Caroline was in hospital for what was the first of many rounds of chemotherapy. The doctors said that had Caroline not had that blood test she would have been dead within weeks. She and Donna were rightly terrified.
Donna charted Caroline’s treatment in brilliant, painfully honest, often darkly sardonic and always brazenly personal posts on a blog she called Those Blasted Cells. She wanted to tell their huge army of friends all over the world the news as it happened, but also to make sense of the journey for fellow sufferers. This attention to others is typical of Caroline and Donna. Apart from being gut-wrenching and heart-breaking the blog is also a brilliant piece of writing. Even in this terrible situation this extraordinary couple excelled.
Throughout her painful treatment, Caroline was stoic and brave, never complaining and always finding light at the end of what was increasingly becoming a very black tunnel. The joy when we all discovered that her brother Christian was a donor match for a stem cell transplant was palpable. A cheer went up in homes and offices all over Australia.
But this disease was too virulent. We all thought Caroline would do what she had always done – beat the odds. She had conquered every battle in her life and always with a smile on her face. Her death on Monday has left us all asking the same question Caroline had proffered. “Surely this is a mistake?”
For those of us left behind and especially for Donna, their dogs Curly Sullivan and Herbie Sullivan, cat Coco, their families in South Australia… the hole that is left seems too vast to contemplate. “The world is an emptier, less beautiful and much sadder place without you,” wrote Donna on Those Blasted Cells.
Here at The Weekly we would like to pay tribute to an extraordinary woman, our beloved colleague Caroline Roessler. And in Donna’s words “Rest in peace my darling girl.”
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