‘Mum lost her soulmate’: The tragic death driving premiership hero’s new mission

There is a picture that lives on Taylor Smith’s laptop of a time when her parents were the happiest she had seen them. She had just tasted premiership success with the Brisbane Lions – a maiden AFLW title for a club that had reached two grand finals before but failed to go the distance.

Only six months later, her father, Shaun, was gone – a sudden heart attack when he was 52 leaving a heartbreaking void in the family.

“Grief is a crazy process for everyone. It’s up and down all the time. There are little moments where you reflect on it, or might look at a picture, and the reality of it might just hit you in the face,” Smith tells this masthead five years on from her dad’s death.

“My mum lost her soulmate at a time when my brother and I were at an age where we were building our own lives, and they were getting their life together back.

“They were spending their weekends on jet skis and wine tours and all these sorts of things, and to see that taken away from mum, and then my grandparents lost their son, and no parent wants their kid’s time to be up before theirs.

After 76 games in Brisbane colours, Smith began charting a new journey at the Sydney Swans – kicking a game-high three goals on club debut to inspire an eight-point triumph of the Crows.

That clash in Adelaide was attended by her mother, Smith chuckling at how she loved “sharing all the content that comes out – she’s so funny”.

As for Shaun, he was a Brisbane supporter whom Smith always wanted to impress, such was the respect he garnered.

“I think he’d be a Swans supporter now as well. I think he’d appreciate the chance I took and the steps I took to grow as a person and challenge myself,” Smith says.

“I think he would appreciate that more; I don’t think it would matter too much about the colours.”

Smith hints that it was the loss of Shaun that inspired her to take on a new adventure.

“When my dad passed, I had this real clarity of ‘life is so short – if you have a dream, you have to chase it’. Even just with holidays, he really wanted to travel to Japan and go skiing, and he kept saying for three or four years ‘we’ll go on a family holiday’,” Smith says.

“Now he’ll never get to have that experience, and it was just one of those things that made me realise we don’t always have tomorrow. It made me feel like I wanted to live my life to the absolute fullest, to challenge myself and grow and never be comfortable.”

Perhaps what Smith adored most about her relationship with Shaun was how whenever she decided to pursue something, she discovered her father had done the same. She recalls coming home in grade 4 after setting a school high jump record, only to be told by her dad that he did the same in his younger years.