The Warrnambool father of three was diagnosed with a brain tumour just over a year ago and in February he was told he had one or two months – maybe six months - left to live. However, doctors also told them it was hard to predict the exact time. 

“Best to take one day at a time,” Murray said.

Friends have rallied around the family and have started a Go Fund Me fundraiser to help get them to New Zealand for Murray’s mum’s 70th birthday next month, and to give him the chance to say goodbye to the rest of his family.

For almost 25 years, the couple has always been part of the same team planning their futures together but a terminal cancer diagnosis has forced them to have to plan different paths alone.

Just admitting to themselves that that is their new reality hurts. “I struggle with the emotions with it,” Michelle said.

It’s a big adjustment for the Silvers who are due to celebrate their Silver wedding anniversary in October.

“The important thing is to be productive with the time that I have left and not be a burden to everyone,” Murray said.

“With deterioration of my eyesight and not being a position where it is safe to drive anymore, it’s like slowly been disarmed, not disarmed in a horrible way. But having all the weapons at your disposal to do things taken off you, that’s very very hard.”

“We either shut ourselves off in a room somewhere and sit in front of the TV or we can continue on and it’s important for me to continue on in some productive way.”

And for the arts/design/technology teacher keeping busy meant last week he was cutting down a bench in the office/storage room at their home. “I’ve made a lovely mess,” he said.

It was when the family moved from NSW back to the south-west to take up a position at King’s College that he noticed the first signs there was something wrong.

“It was odd to be suddenly waking up in the middle of the night with nightly headaches as I had never been a smoker and not exactly a big drinker,” he said.

They arrived in Warrnambool on the Saturday to stay with friends while they looked for somewhere to rent and by Friday he looked so terrible that Michelle took him to the hospital.

“They did a CT scan and said there’s something not quite right there. Then they did an MRI and said he’s got a tumor,” Michelle said. “That night about 11.30 they took us in an ambulance to Melbourne.”

He was told he had Glioblastoma which is the most aggressive cancer that begins within the brain

“If you get to one year, you’re doing good, the statistics aren’t great,” Michelle said.

They operated on the Sunday. “They said they got all they could see, but because of the type of tumour it can come back anywhere in the brain,” Michelle said.

Murray returned home after the operation and was planning to head back to work – “in the workshop making things with students who want to be there”. 

“It is a joyous subject to teach,” he said. Murray had previously taught at Hamilton’s Monivae College for four years before they moved to NSW.

But in May his condition deteriorated rapidly and he was rushed back to hospital where they found he had a staph infection and they had to operate again.

“They said his head was just full of infection,” she said.

The bone flap from the first operation was also infected, so they removed it. Michelle thought then that she was going to lose him. 

The infection delayed his cancer treatments which included travelling to Geelong every Sunday for five days of radiotherapy and chemotherapy for six weeks because Warrnambool’s cancer centre hadn’t yet opened. 

On top of that there were specialist appointments, and the side effects of treatment made things difficult at the time.

While they were away, their daughters would stay with different families – the Drakes, Van Zyls, Dowlings and Jellies - so they could stay at school. 

“It was a real blessing,” they said.

The family plan to fly to NZ on June 9.

Friends have already donated fuel cards so Michelle and their three daughters can make the two-day drive from her parents’ house near Queenstown to Murray’s. Murray will fly.

“The kindness of people whilst I’ve been ‘realigned’ in terms of what I was employed as and what I do every day, the people that I meet now – it’s good,” Murray said.

“Your sense of reality sometimes it closes in but other times it’s closing in but you’re meeting people that you never would have met in your life before.”