The photograph is both beautiful and sad: new mother Sally Obermeder clutching her baby daughter, their shoulders wrapped in a gold web, their bald heads wrapped in scarves.
Little Annabelle, now five, came into the world just two days after the Channel Seven journalist was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2011.
Three months later, legendary New York-based Australian photographer Anne Geddes captured that image. An image Obermeder has reflected upon in a touching Instagram post.
“I was so sick and struggling under the trauma of chemo, but Anne and her team made us feel totally enveloped in love and for a brief moment I forgot I was sick,” the 43-year-old wrote.
“She captured the love, but also the sadness in my eyes.”
Listen: The challenge of surviving breast cancer while managing family time. (Podcast continues after video).
For a long time, Obermeder wrote in the post, that sadness was all she could see in the picture.
But today, free of the disease and with another healthy young daughter, she looks at it through a new lens.
“A few months ago when we moved and I packed it up I looked at it somehow with fresh eyes,” she wrote.
“All I could see was us in a tight bond inside the web that life had spun for us.”
(Scroll through the post below to see Geddes’ photo.)
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