IIt’s a sunny Saturday morning as I enter Carriageworks in the Sydney suburb of Eveleigh, and the farmers market is in full swing outside. But I bypass the stalls and the crowds: I’m here to spend some time with a young woman called Emily Lahey. Three minutes, to be precise.
I enter the darkness of one of the venue’s concrete performance bays, sit on a spotlighted bench, and watch a short video narrated by Emily. Then she joins me, and we sit side by side as a giant digital clock projected onto the wall in front of us counts down from 3:00 to 0:00. When my time is up, I have to leave.
During the day, about 30 people sat with Emily. Some used their three minutes for quiet reflection. Others wanted to have a conversation, ask her questions or tell her why they had come to see her. Normally, you would describe a project like this as performance art, but Emily is not an artist: she is a terminally ill 32-year-old who does not know how much time she has left. Her performance is part of a project called Time to livedesigned by the Australian Cancer Research Foundation (ACRF) to raise awareness and funds. Each participant effectively “bought” a piece of Emily’s time. Some were complete strangers, others were family and friends; either way, the experience stirred up strong emotions. In the foyer afterwards, I meet another participant, Helen, who is visibly moved. It has touched so many of us both: we talk about the grief of losing our mothers to cancer, the fear of living with a genetic predisposition.
When you first meet Emily, you wouldn’t know she was sick, let alone that she’s undergone consecutive rounds of chemo, radiation and immunotherapy. “People don’t believe me when I tell them I have terminal cancer,” she says as we speak via Zoom a few days before her performance.
In 2019, when she was just 27, doctors discovered a tumour the size of a cricket ball in her sinus and skull bone. Just a few months earlier, she had been healthy and fit, running 5-10km a day as a member of the Australian Defence Forces. When she developed headaches and symptoms consistent with sinusitis, doctors initially dismissed them as such, and it was only when she began to lose the vision in her left eye that scans revealed the tumour. Chemotherapy proved unsuccessful; the cancer had spread. Genomic testing revealed it was NUT carcinoma, a rare and aggressive mutation with few treatment options and a typical prognosis of six to nine months.
That Emily is still alive four years later is largely thanks to an advanced treatment not yet available in Australia, which she was able to access from the US as part of a “compassionate” government scheme – but only after her condition had deteriorated enough that more common treatments had proven ineffective. “(At the time) it was very frustrating to know that there was a proven treatment option with demonstrated efficacy overseas. I thought, ‘Why can’t I have access to it now?’” Emily says.
This aspect of Emily’s experience embodies ACRF’s raison d’être, “to fund world-class research into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of[cancer]”. Founded in 1984, the charity has distributed more than $184 million to research institutions across Australia – and to mark its 40th anniversary, it enlisted David Gibson and Nathan Lennon, former creative directors at New York advertising agency Droga5 (and best known in Sydney as co-founders of Hawke’s Brewing in Marrickville) to devise a campaign highlighting the life-changing potential of its work.
It was Gibson and Lennon who came up with the idea for Time to Live, working with ACRF’s fundraising and marketing manager, Carly du Toit, who found Emily through a call for proposals. “She embodies everything that ACRF does. She’s brave and daring,” says Du Toit. “And she’s very much a collaborator with the project. It’s not just us bringing her on board and telling her story. She’s actively contributed to every part of the exhibition and the experience.”
Taking part was a “no-brainer” for Emily. “Without research, I wouldn’t be here,” she says. “The treatments that I’m getting and the testing that I’ve had to get access to those treatments are pretty cutting-edge.” She hopes Time to Live shows “how important it is to continue to fund those research efforts, to give people like me more time.”
The video I watch before sitting down with Emily shows what that extra time has meant to her. You see her celebrate big milestones, like her 30th birthday and her marriage to her partner, Jason, whom she met just three weeks before her cancer diagnosis. You see the smaller moments, too, the everyday joys and laughter of time spent with family and friends. In her story, she describes her remaining time as “not a clock ticking down, but a precious gift not to be wasted.”
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As a participant, this message comes through: inevitably, you evaluate your own life against this yardstick. Am I getting the most out of it? Helen says that was one of the reasons she took part. She has personal experience with cancer: every woman in her family has had it, and she lost her mother to cancer five years ago. “I need something that gives me a thrill to live, a thrill to do something,” she tells me. “I’m 55. Is it too late?”
As we stand in line, we skip the small talk and get straight to the big topics; the experience has made us emotional and philosophical, and we end up having the kind of conversation that’s rare even among friends. We talk about how considering Emily’s story and preparing to spend time with her has had a kind of emotional and psychological domino effect. Beyond the funds raised and the time spent in the room, perhaps this is the lasting impact: a rare moment to grapple with the fleeting nature of life and to connect with others in that struggle.
As each of us leaves Time to Live, Emily hands over an envelope with a card inside; it reads, “I gave you my time. Now it’s your time to give that gift to someone else.”