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On Drive with Rafael Epstein

These are particularly personal tales charting a turning point in someone's life with a song to match. There's no hard or fast topic for the stories featured on Changing Tracks, just "a song that was playing when your life changed tracks." Send in yours.

This week’s Changing Track is for Mat:

In 2014 I started spending some time with a girl I met through a community band that I had recently joined. One night she invited me for dinner. She wooed me with a delicious Yotam Ottolenghi dish, an amazing beef and smoky eggplant shakshuka and some delicious homemade fig ice-cream. Little did I know at the time that this girl would one day become my wife.

We didn’t fall head over heels for each other right away. Rather our love and interest in each other grew slowly and was built on respect and a common interest in music. I also loved her smile and the way she could make me laugh. I soon discovered that she was an amazing baker and this certainly piqued my interest. Who doesn’t love a sweet treat!

At Christmas in 2017 she proposed and I didn’t hesitate to say “Yes.” After three years, there was no doubt in my mind that we were meant to be together. We moved in together in 2017 and got married at the end of 2018. We adopted two beautiful greyhounds who have filled our lives with so much joy.

In 2020 as the world was entering a global pandemic I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Things were going well in 2020. The tumour was successfully removed, and I was on an immunotherapy treatment to help prevent the cancer recurring. At the start of 2021 my cancer returned but this time it was far more serious. It had metastasised to my vertebra and over the year has spread further along the spine, into several ribs and there are also lesions in my pelvis, a lymph node and the liver. I have so many tumours that I have stopped counting them. Recently I was given the grim prognosis of 3-9 months. All our plans and dreams for our future together have been pulled from underneath us.

On that (first?) night that she cooked the delicious Ottolenghi dish I was treated to a piano performance. My wife plays piano beautifully and she played a Chopin Nocturne for me. It was at this point that she gained the nickname ‘Chopin girl’. There are many things that I will miss in life - food, music, nature, taleggio cheese, oysters, good red wine, friends and family, laughter and all the things in life that make it so beautiful and mysterious.

But I think one of the things I will miss the most is listening to my wife Claire play the piano. Claire is a developing composer with a beautiful unique musical voice and we share a similar musical aesthetic. There is nothing I enjoy more than listening to her improvise her compositional ideas on the piano.

Little did I know the course my life would take that night and how things would unfold over the next five years. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that turned into a wonderful marriage. We have had our ups and downs and now sadly this cancer has taken over our lives.

Living with terminal cancer is the most hideous experience – it is a cruel disease. But, our life together has always been filled with the joy of music; and today for my changing track I’d like to share that Chopin Nocturne that Claire played for me.

The following is an additional message added to Mat's Changing Track from Claire:

My darling sweet Matthew passed away early this morning. While my sadness is immense and I don't know how I'll carry on without him, he is at peace now. He faced his illness with such bravery and now, he doesn't need to suffer anymore. It was incredibly hard watching him lose strength and fade away because that's not the Mat I knew, but I and all those around me will feel his love forever. May he rest in peace.

These are particularly personal tales charting a turning point in someone's life with a song to match. A new story airs every Friday at 5.30pm, on ABC Radio Melbourne's Drive with Raf Epstein. Hear older Changing Tracks.

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