In the quiet times, she tends her daughter's garden — planted so that something will always be in flower through each season. Jaimi loved flowers, especially pink ones, and this garden has been made in her memory.
Lisa Curry — triple Olympian, elite athlete, golden girl — is almost 60 now, and a grandmother. It is a time of reflection on a life that has been lived at high velocity. A big life. A series of chapters.
A life that, for 20 years, was measured in seconds. The seconds between winning and losing a race, breaking a record, getting a gold medal.
Decades spent relentlessly swimming up and down that black line, pushing through, powering faster and stronger to shave off those seconds.
A high performer in everything she does, at 60 she can look back on towering highs, resilience through the lows, a life filled with love, joy, disappointment and, in recent years, profound loss. The loss of her daughter and her mother. Her "bookends", as she calls them.
She has been fundamentally changed by it.
"I just don't feel like the same person anymore. It's like your soul has changed," Lisa tells ABC's Australian Story.
Now she knows what is important and not important in life.
"It's not about the medals, it's not about records, it's not about success and failure. It's about family, it's about love," Lisa says.
Big hair and big dreams: Life in the public eye
Lisa's life has been a public one — much of it lived out in women's magazines or followed by the paparazzi.
The wholesome blonde, beach girl. The super mum who kept swimming at an elite level after the birth of her daughters. The golden couple with her first husband Grant Kenny. The muscular epitome of health and positivity.
The birth of each child has been shared, along with every milestone — and some questionable hairstyles.
"I had the worst hairstyles in the history of Australian personalities," Lisa laughs.
"Like, seriously, I had the 80s hairstyle, I had a Billy Idol hairstyle, I had a shocking perm."
Her son Jett agrees: "Mum's never been one for fashion, I don't think that was ever her strong point."
Lisa, says her friend Rose Fydler, "seems to glow in public, she has thrived on it".
"In the heyday, in the 80s and 90s, when magazines were big, she would have moved tens of thousands of copies."
Her friend, Janet Hine, says the world grew up with Lisa and her family.
"I think everyone just grew up with each child that was born. Everybody felt that they knew them [Lisa's family]," she says.
However, beneath the sunny facade, the past 18 years have been struggle and sadness that no one knew about: Trauma that would ultimately claim the life of her eldest child.
A life at a crossroads
Today, living on a lush property on the Sunshine Coast with her second husband, Mark Tabone, along with animals and wildlife, out on her ride-on mower, Lisa considers herself "a modern boho hippie who swam for a while".
The woman who could never sit still, was always busy, who had an unshakeable work ethic, always reaching goals is — for the time being — living at a slower, more contemplative pace while she navigates this raw phase of her life.
"I'm at a crossroads," Lisa says.
During this time, she has sorted through her memories, opened up old shoeboxes full of medals, to write her memoir Lisa: 60 Years of Life, Love and Loss.
It was, she writes: "A different journey, and one that hurt in different ways. The achievements and failures. The soaring loves and the losses too painful to bear."
A golden girl is born
Growing up in Brisbane, Lisa had a typically active Australian childhood, going to the Gold Coast beaches on the weekends.
One "stinking hot" summer day in 1972 she was spotted at the pool by Harry Gallagher, who had coached Dawn Fraser to three gold medals.
Harry told her parents they would have to get her teeth straightened because "she's going to have her photo taken a lot". Lisa was 10 years old.
She loved swimming and training so much.
"Mum never had to wake me up. Some days I was so excited I'd sleep in my togs," Lisa remembers.
That never changed in the two decades that were to come.
She would make up for lack of stature or talent with sheer hard work and rigorous discipline.
"My mantra from all those years is. 'If you are going to do something, do it properly, do it 110 per cent'."
Friend Rose Fydler says Lisa has always been "supremely self-confident", even as a teenager.
"She knew exactly who she was. And, not only that, she liked who she was."
Lisa estimates she would ultimately swim more than 40,000 kilometres: "Tracking that relentless black line at the bottom of the pool. Up and down until I knew every crack in the pool tiles and how many strokes it would take me to get to the other end, how many breaths I could take."
By the time she was 14, Lisa was one of the fastest swimmers for her age in the world.
By 18, she was at the Moscow Olympics, coming fifth in the 100-metre butterfly.
Lisa remembers sitting on her bed with a stopwatch.
"I'd see myself on the blocks. Even now, I can actually feel the blocks under my feet. I can remember the texture. I would start the stopwatch, dive in, I'd stop the stopwatch and was pretty spot on, a couple of tenths of a second either side of what I wanted to do."
At the Brisbane Commonwealth Games in 1982, in front of a home crowd, she would win three gold medals, breaking a Commonwealth record in the 200-metre medley.
"The crowd lifted the roof off that pool," she recalls.
Suddenly, she was a star: "I wasn't really anybody. But, after the Commonwealth Games, I was somebody. I became one of the poster girls — Lisa Forrest and Tracey Wickham, myself — the mean machine."
'I'm going to marry that guy': When Lisa met Grant
On the last night of swimming, she crossed paths with Grant Kenny on his way to meet the Queen.
Grant was famously "hot", a pin-up, a star ironman, on TV every night promoting Nutri-Grain cereals.
"And, then, we accidentally bumped into each other at five o'clock the next morning at Sunnybank pub," Lisa remembers.
Newly famous, people had been buying her drinks all night: "I was basically holding up the door when Grant walked in."
After he left to go to training, she told her friend: 'I'm going to marry that guy.'"
The pair married in 1986 — she was 23, he 22.
"We thought we were mature," Lisa recalls.
It was the Queensland sports' wedding of the year.
"It was 80s over-the-top," Grant's sister, Melinda Kenny, says.
Together the couple was irresistible to the media and marketers: He was the golden boy of the surf, she was the golden girl of the pool.
Lisa began doing the commercials for Uncle Toby's.
The following year, their daughter, Jaimi Lee, was born.
"She was a beautiful, beautiful baby," Lisa remembers.
Former swimmer and friend Georgie Parkes says the pair were alike.
"Jaimi had very many traits of her mother. She was strong-willed, she was very determined, even from a tiny little tot."
'I know I can swim fast again': Lisa's comeback
Lisa had given no thought to swimming again but, in 1988, she was at the World Masters Swimming Championships in Brisbane.
There she saw the American Sandy Neilson-Bell, who had won three gold medals at the Munich Summer Olympics, retired for five years and come back to swim faster than any Australian woman ever had in the 50m and 100m freestyle at the age of 33.
"My events," Lisa says. "I said to Grant: 'I know I can swim fast again.'"
She hadn't been in a pool for five years.
"The first time I dived into a pool I just felt like a big brick," she writes in her book.
For the first month, she had to push through: "Nothing felt natural, everything felt heavy and hurt."
Friend Georgie Parkes says Lisa was a trailblazer.
"There were not many mothers who were swimming at world top-class levels. So, to have a baby, and we know the impact that has on your body, and getting yourself back into fitness, into high-performance shape, is phenomenal."
Training for the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, Lisa was often up all night with Jaimi.
Swimming against Susie O'Neill, who was 10 years younger, she looked for the psychological edge.
"I just had to be smart about it, I had to play with her a little bit."
She won four gold medals and a silver, breaking Commonwealth records.
"It was just being able to prove to everyone that it can be done, you've just got to do the work."
She retired at the top, had another baby, Morgan, and a year later — at the age of 29 — started training for the Barcelona Olympic Games.
"So many people told me I couldn't do it," Lisa writes.
"People said I was way too old, had no time to train and too many responsibilities. Dawn Fraser said publicly that I should hang up my goggles and leave it to the younger kids."
Her swimming career was 14 years long — almost unheard of. And she came so close.
"But there was just that one thing that I never got, which is what I wanted, which is that just like one Olympic medal."
Two years later, her son Jett was born and the family was complete.
Lisa never slowed down and she continued working, dealing with her endorsements, public speaking and designing her Hot Curry Swimwear.
One day the phone rang, and it was Prime Minister John Howard asking her to be chair of the Australia Day Council.
"I was in important meetings and felt grown up."
'I wanted to shout out, can anyone help my child?'
After 28 years together the golden couple was no more. Lisa and Grant parted amicably.
"We just felt like we were kind of going in different directions after so many years. We're still great mates."
Lisa moved down the road and Jett, who was 14, would "skate down the road to mum's for dinner".
Despite the split, the pair would always remain united in their support for daughter Jaimi, who started becoming unwell with an eating disorder at age 15.
“She swam very well, and then she just suddenly quit because the kids at school started saying she looked like a boy, and she had muscles,” Lisa says.
Jaimi had so many gifts, her mother says.
"Jaimi was an amazing cook. She's an amazing stylist, photography.
"[But] she didn't feel like she was good enough at anything. She was. We could see it. She couldn't see it."
In her book, Lisa writes that Jaimi had a smile that could light up a room.
"She was an intelligent, beautiful girl, yet in her eyes — in her head — she was not good at anything and hated the way she looked.
"We tried so hard to understand what was going on in her mind."
As an adult, Jaimi developed an alcohol addiction.
"So it was a triple whammy. Not eating, bingeing and drinking all at once," Lisa says.
The husband of one of Lisa's friends, Mark Forbes, started endED, an organisation that provides support for families and carers of those suffering from eating disorders. He became a source of information and support for Lisa and her family.
"If somebody has an eating disorder for any great length of time, they're trapped and they don't know how to escape this thing, this beast that's got them, so they turn to another addiction to soften what's going on," Mark says.
"Early intervention is the key because, unfortunately, if it's been in your child for quite some time, it's bloody hard to get rid of."
Lisa and Grant saw doctors, specialists, psychologists, psychiatrists and "almost weekly medical interventions".
"Everyone was trying and failing to get to the bottom of Jaimi's deep hurt."
There was confusion, Lisa says: "How do we fix this? But no one could tell us what to do or how to fix things or what to say. And so we were all really confused about how to even navigate this thing."
Jett lived through it. "I saw everything — the hospital visits, the ambulances, all that kind of thing. Like, I lived with that every single day."
Every year, it got worse. "We didn't know how to fix it," Lisa writes of her fragile daughter.
"We wish we could have. All Jaimi's friends and family tried to help her. We were all living with it, and it was heartbreaking to watch."
She tells Australian Story: "She needed to go to long-term rehab because it takes time to get through all those layers, but Jaimi was an adult. We couldn't make her go."
Friend Georgie says the family "left no stone unturned, they never gave up".
When Jaimi was 28, the doctors told them she might not make her 30th birthday.
Lisa says every moment after that she was on edge with worry.
"Every day, every week, every month after that, it's like, 'Is this the hospital visit she won't come home from? I haven't heard from her for five days, where is she? What's her state of mind?'
"I wanted to shout out, 'Can anyone help my child?' This went on for about five years. We never knew when that last day was going to be."
When Morgan had her son Flynn, Jaimi was, her brother Jett says, "vibrant and happy … she just wanted a family and her own kids".
'He's been perfect for Mum': Lisa finds love again
After her marriage ended, Lisa was "cautious" and "couldn't be bothered" with another relationship.
"I could sleep when I wanted to. I could go where I wanted to. I didn't have to be accountable to anyone," she wrote.
However, she met Mark Tabone in June 2015 on a charity walk. He is an Elvis impersonator and "he's incredible at what he does", Jett says.
Lisa took her friends to a performance. Mark, who was single after a 25-year marriage, had watched Lisa at the Olympics and wanted to impress her.
Lisa introduced him to her friend, Georgie.
"He was very calm and quiet. And, half an hour later, boom, the show starts and out comes this guy who was just phenomenal," Georgie says.
Lisa thought, "You know what, he is actually really nice. He's funny and caring, he is interesting and he had a Kombi and I had a Kombi."
They both love 60s music. When they were married, in May 2015, Lisa looked spectacular.
"I think he's been perfect for mum," Jett says.
Jaimi's final birthday
Jaimi made it to her 30th birthday. But, says Jett, "You could sort of see her health declining".
"In my heart, I just knew that the hope is diminishing," Lisa says.
"You never give up hope. You're always looking for something to turn the corner because life can be beautiful. But they have to want it."
On Jaimi's 33rd birthday, in June 2020, they had a picnic at the hospital with cupcakes. It would be her last.
"The doctors said that her liver was failing but, in the end, it was multiple organ failure," Lisa says.
"We were there when she took her first breath, and we were then when she took her last."
Life amid grief: Finding the 'old' Lisa
Just over 18 months since Jaimi died, Lisa says she's full of "What-ifs".
"We didn't have the education to pick up on red flags, signals or triggers. We just didn't know."
She admits she has spent much of the past two years "crying and eating".
Her grief was monumental, she was "drowning in the pain".
"I'm still in the state where I am still trying to work it out because I can't work it out. And it's annoying me, because if I can help someone else, if I can say, 'Here's something that I've learnt', it might help another family's kid, but I can't seem to do it.
"If I knew the answers, I'd be shouting it to the world."
For the first time in her life, Lisa doesn't know which way to go.
"But the important part is to just start walking in any direction and see where it takes you. It's time to start finding Lisa again."
And, as Lisa sits in what she's dubbed "Jaimi's garden" at her Sunshine Coast home — which she and Mark created — she takes a moment to think about her firstborn child.
When she thinks about Jaimi, a little willy wagtail appears to keep her company. She has called it Jaimi Wagtail.
"I don't know if I will get the old Lisa back. I hope so."
Watch Australian Story's The Deep End on iview and Youtube.
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