Lucy Meacock: What Tony Collier has taught me about resilience

My phone contacts list is full of people who are sadly no longer with us. I cannot bear to delete any of them and nothing would give me greater joy than being able to have one more conversation with any of them.

Most showed incredible resilience when it came to their final diagnosis of incurable illness. And it intrigued me why one person can be so strong when another can give up on life very quickly.

My Mum died when I was 25. She said she was determined to be as strong as possible when she was ill with bone cancer. She hoped in later years I would remember her strength and it would help me realise you can deal with anything in life however tough it is.

It did help but it was so tough to lose first my beloved Dad and then great friends like Tony Wilson and Tony Morris.

In fact three very close friends of mine are dealing with incurable illnesses at the moment - two are battling cancer and one has the terribly cruel Motor Neurone Disease (MND). But somehow all have remained incredibly upbeat.

One has ovarian cancer and every day she finds something to be positive about. The blueness of the sky. The happiness of birdsong. The blossom on the trees.

She rarely talks of illness and pain. But she is taking every chance she is offered by the medics – every drug cocktail and every piece of advice.

Other people with the same diagnosis refuse all treatment and give up straight away.

And then there are the other people in perfect health who can only focus on the bleakness of the world, on their sadness and disappointment. They seem to only see negatives and spend their lives looking for something to complain about.

Why is that? Well, I obviously don’t have the answers. But I know a man who has some of them...

He is Tony Collier who says the secret is to focus on living for the moment, exercise and getting out into nature if you can.

At first when he was diagnosed with prostate he admits he went into a spiral of depression. But he somehow managed to dig himself out of that to continue his running. And how.

Was it support from his loving family, was it a strength learned long ago in childhood – or was it a strength that he simply managed to draw on when he needed it most?

Whatever your challenges in life I hope his resilience might help inspire you too.

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