Mel Schilling’s husband has paid tribute to the Married at First Sight star to mark the anniversary of their marriage, after her death earlier this year.
The beloved dating coach died in March at the age of 54, after doctors had informed her that the cancer she had been diagnosed with had spread to her brain.
A statement shared by her husband Gareth Brisbane to Instagram said that in her final moments, Schilling whispered a message for him and their daughter Maddie which ‘will sustain him for the rest of his life’.
The couple married in Bali in 2020 and Brisbane has now shared a photo of the couple kissing and holding their daughter on their wedding day, to commemorate his first anniversary without her.
In the caption he wrote: ‘Ah my one. Hard to reconcile that the anniversary of the happiest day of my life could become one of the saddest.
‘We didn’t quite make eight years married or 15 years together but what a love and what a life we had!’
He went on to recall their first date together and how by the end of it, he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with the reality star.
‘My love for you burned ever brighter, even as your own light faded,’ Brisbane wrote in the emotional post. ‘Sleep easy my girl, I hope you know that Maddie and I are in the best possible place to continue healing.
‘She is every inch your daughter and you would be so proud of the remarkable young woman she is becoming.’
He then concluded: ‘Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.’
The couple met on a dating website eight years prior to their wedding, at which Schilling previously admitted she ‘had a bit of a cry’.
‘It’s just the meaning of it all,’ she told Who Magazine. ‘I was a late bloomer in life. I didn’t meet my husband until I was nearly 40 and then we had our daughter when I was nearly 42, so to be finally saying our “I dos” was an emotional time. It was very special.’
In the March post sharing her terminal diagnosis, Schilling said of her husband and daughter: ‘These two beside me are my everything.’