"The storyteller was a wild woman with a razor-sharp tongue, who was born to celebrate life."
This is how Ken Lambert describes his wife Jill Emberson in the voiceover for a short film honouring the former ABC broadcaster and ovarian cancer funding advocate.
The beautiful words are taken from the eulogy he wrote the day before her funeral in Newcastle in December 2019.
"At that stage, it was only a few days after she died and she had a pretty horrible death, ovarian cancer was not kind to her, so it was a very intense time," Dr Lambert recalls.
Emberson's life was cut short at the age of 60 — four years after being diagnosed. She had been the voice of ABC Newcastle's Mornings program for seven years before switching her focus to sharing her experience with the disease.
The short film, called Carry the Courage for Jill, is part of Ovarian Cancer Australia's Carry the Courage campaign to raise awareness of the underfunded and deadliest of all women's cancers.
Dr Lambert believes Emberson would be pleased her voice was still being used to fight for more attention and funding.
"One thing Jill did say to me that she would like to be remembered, that she wouldn't want to be forgotten," he says.
COVID halted momentum
Emberson was a fierce advocate and powerful communicator, making an award-winning podcast, Still Jill, about her gruelling treatment, as well as speaking at Parliament House in Canberra.
At the time, she said: "Less common cancers account for 50 per cent of the cancers but they only get 12 per cent of the funding. That's like a red rag to a bull, to somebody like me."
Emberson launched a movement called Pink Meets Teal, hoping to draw on the success of the pink-themed breast cancer advocacy work to boost the teal-coloured ovarian cancer campaign.
"Jill thought that women with gynaecological cancers could sort of hold hands with women with breast cancer," Dr Lambert says.
But shortly after she died, the COVID pandemic plunged Australia and the world into lockdowns and everything else ground to a halt.
"I think she would have been pretty disappointed that that happened, but that was something that was out of everybody's control," Dr Lambert says.
It's hoped this year's campaign will reignite some of that momentum.
Ovarian Cancer Australia chief executive Jane Hill said they did not want Jill's efforts drawing attention to an often overlooked disease to be in vain.
"I think we've beautifully portrayed the spirit and the effort that Jill brought to this issue," Ms Hill says.
"She was a driving force. I think she had a fierceness to her, a fearlessness, but she also showed her vulnerability."
Grief in lockdown
Revisiting the period immediately after losing Emberson is difficult for her husband.
"I can't watch [the film] without being in tears again and feeling like the grief's right in front of me and very acute and very painful," he says.
The COVID pandemic hit as he was grieving.
"I was in this house that was empty, empty of this really strong presence of this woman who had crafted everything within the place, you know, the decorations, the furniture, and her voice.
"I would wake up at four o'clock in the morning and just be beside myself."
To cope with the anxiety and being alone, Dr Lambert began going on pre-dawn runs and swims and took up sunrise photography.
He said the only blessing was that the pandemic didn't happen while Jill was alive so she was able to say her farewells from palliative care.
He also lamented that she wasn't there to cover the pandemic as a journalist and help her community through it, given her local relationships and experience from her triple j days when she was part of the team getting important health messaging out about HIV/AIDS.
"I felt really sad that she wasn't around to really do something that I know she would have performed brilliantly," he says.
Some optimism, but investment needed
Emberson's film has been released in the lead-up to World Ovarian Cancer Day, which is held on May 8.
About 5,000 women are living with ovarian cancer in Australia. More than half of them will die within five years of diagnosis.
Ms Hill says the poor survival rate is much worse than breast cancer.
"In the past 20 years, the five-year survival rate for people with a breast cancer diagnosis has increased from 73 per cent to 92 per cent. We want the same for ovarian cancer," she says.
Since Jill's death there has been some improvements in understanding the disease and treatment options, such as the use of PARP inhibitors — a new class of drug that improves quality of life for some women.
But Ovarian Cancer Australia estimates $100 million is needed over the next four or five years to significantly boost survival rates.
"I feel much more optimistic about the prospects of us achieving much higher survival rates in the future," Ms Hill says.
"But it really depends on systemised investment in ovarian cancer, in supportive care, and also in research."
