Woman rocked by dad’s deathbed bombshell

After a strained relationship for years, Megan Lilburn was floored by her father’s final request during the last “brutal” hours of his life.

Megan Lilburn’s relationship was already strained when he asked her to fulfil a difficult promise on his deathbed.

Megan had been 23 when she discovered her father was a bigamist who had another life separate to the one she shared with him.

“I found out that he had been living a double life for some years and that I had a half-brother, who was only four,” she tells this week’s episode of Insight.

“And then it also came out during that time, perhaps not on that first day, that he’d also married the lady in question that he’d been living a double life with.

“So that made him a bigamist, because he was still married to my mother.”

It took 10 years for Megan to reconcile with her father and she went to visit him in Singapore where he was living with his second wife and her half-brother.

She went on the trip “with great optimism” and thought it was “time to maybe try and repair the relationship”.

But instead he dropped yet another bombshell, Megan told Insight host Kumi Taguchi.

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Megan Lilburn with her father as a child. Picture: Supplied.

‘He’d actually met someone else’: Another bombshell

“Dad and I went out just for our lunch on our own for some time together to a dumpling restaurant,” she recalled.

“During the lunch, it came out that he’d actually met somebody else and that he was planning on ending his relationship with his second wife … (and was) moving forward with the third lady, shall we say.”

Megan said she was “totally shocked” by the revelation and “practically spat my dumpling all over him” — but there was more.

“I think in my anger … (I said) something like, ‘Surely you wouldn’t be silly enough to go ahead and have any more children’ or, you know, that sort of thing,” she said.

“And just the look on his face, told me there obviously was a child. Yeah. So after much pressing and fishing, he had to admit to me that there was a child, there was already a little girl and there was another one on the way.”

Megan had been heartbroken to find out about her father’s secret marriage and child. Picture: Supplied.

Megan took the news “not very well” as she had already been “angry for many years anyway” at her father for having a secret second wife and son.

“So to sit there at a time that I’d initiated coming to Singapore, let’s try and fix this. And I hear that he’s not only, done it again, almost and it came out that he’d actually had married this third lady as well,” she said.

“ So now, now he’s a double bigamist and he’d done a double life twice over … I was floored, like, how could, how could this have happened twice?

“I guess I stormed out, my memory’s patchy of that, what happened right then, but I certainly left.”

Megan and her father in Singapore during their reconciliation attempt. Picture: Supplied.

‘Sense of duty’ prompted Megan to fill deathbed request

Tragically Megan’s father was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 2019.

She was by his side during the last few days on his deathbed, during which time he dropped another bombshell.

“He asked me, sort of about 48 hours before he died, whether I would promise to look after the three young kids after he’d died,” she said.

“This is his third family and there were three children in the end.”

The request felt overwhelming at time when Megan was consumed by her father’s “brutal, nasty” cancer death and was “a lot to digest on top of holding his hand while he died”.

In the end it was “a sense of duty” that prompted Megan to say yes to her dad’s request.

“I just knew we were getting quite close to the end and I knew how stressed he was about dying, and I just sort of felt I had no choice,” she said.

Megan and her father during the final week of his life. Picture: Supplied.

Since her father’s death Megan has provided help for her father’s three children through a “fair bit of financial help”, as well as emotional support by getting them into grief counselling.

She has also helped her stepmother settle here as she is from overseas and “still getting used to Australian life”.

“They’re great kids and I, you know, my heart breaks for them that they’ve lost dad at such a young age,” Megan said.

“So, you know, I’d like to be there for them and be around for them. I just need to do that in a way that’s going to benefit both of us.”

Watch Megan’s full interview on this week’s episode of Insight about deathbed confessions and promises, airing Tuesday night at 8.30pm and streaming on SBS On Demand.