‘He wasn’t dead yet’: Gill got rejected from a widow’s group, so she started her own

When Gill Malona talks about her husband, Hans Su, her face lights up.

She was working her first job at a local Chinese joint at age 17 more than a decade ago when she asked her friend about the new guy, and two words caught her attention.

Gill Malona’s face lights up when she talks about her husband, Hans Su, who died in October 2022 at age 29.Credit: Joe Armao

“She’s like, ‘he’s Asian and he’s really tall’,” Gill says with a laugh.

“We met in the back room over there, so unglamorous — I was packing prawn crackers with dirty, oily gloves on.”

We’re sitting in a green booth at the same restaurant at Berwick in Melbourne’s south-east, Roast’d Chinese BBQ & Duck, where the couple met all those years ago.

Hans was a 19-year-old university student at the time. He was flustered, rushing to meet their boss, when he went to shake Gill’s hand. She had to turn him down, awkwardly raising her oily gloves.

“They’ve actually renovated so much since that time but it still feels so familiar,” Gill says.

Gill is now 29, and she and Hans have an 18-month-old daughter, Olivia, who keeps her busy.

Only, Hans isn’t here to help raise her.

Gill Malona and Hans Su at the Berwick restaurant, then called the Seasons Restaurant, in December 2013.

He died in October 2022, aged 29, about 15 months after he was diagnosed with stage-four bowel cancer during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns in July 2021.

Doctors gave Hans between 10 and 12 months to live in January the following year.

Gill says she knew it was cancer as soon as a doctor called and told her Hans had a mass in his bowel. I first came across her story on Tomorrow Funerals’ podcast and was struck by her vulnerability and just how quickly their lives must have derailed at that moment.

By that time, the couple was in their eighth year together. At the start of their relationship, Gill still lived at her family home and wasn’t allowed a boyfriend until after university, so she feared anything developing between them.

But even their bosses, Tanagorn Lorsubkong (known as Lor) and Wannika Natngam — who still own the Berwick restaurant — picked up on their fondness for each other.

Wannika is waiting on us today, opening their dining room —normally closed for lunch — especially for this story.

Gill Malona’s order of Hainanese chicken rice, one of her favourites at Roast’d, where she worked as a teenager.Credit: Joe Armao

Gill orders some favourites: fried cream cheese and spinach wontons to share and Hainanese chicken rice. I order the roasted pork belly on thin egg noodles.

When she and Hans worked here, she told him they were “just friends” over text.

“Then he replies and goes … ‘you know what Gill, I do like you, but if you don’t feel the same way, then it’s fine’,” Gill says.

The roasted pork belly on noodles at Roast’d.Credit: Joe Armao

Gill and Hans ended up stealing time together before and after work, eating McDonalds soft serve cones in the car, or hanging out at a park. She didn’t tell her parents about their relationship until after it was “official” but a couple of years later, Hans moved in with Gill’s family.

“My parents just loved him more than they loved me. I’m not even lying,” Gill says, laughing.

They were an impressive pair; a studious and dedicated Gill, graduating from university to work as a registered psychiatric nurse at Casey Hospital.

Financially savvy Hans graduated about the same time with an accounting degree, and the pair built their first home — where Gill still lives — in Clyde North when she was 23.

Years of quiet suburban life followed, punctuated by hiking trips and frequent getaways down the beach with friends — although, “never in the appropriate weather”, Gill says. Hans proposed to her on Mount Oberon in Wilsons Promontory during winter, in the middle of a storm.

“There was no view whatsoever. We were getting pelted by the rain,” Gill says.

The couple initially planned to marry in February 2022 but decided to bring their wedding forward to November 2021 after Hans’ diagnosis.

Gill Malona and Hans Su on their wedding day in November 2021.Credit: Eerik Sandstrom Photography

Gill’s voice wavers a little when she talks about that time.

Hans dealt with stomach problems for years but dismissed it as lactose intolerance. In January 2020, after his pain intensified, he visited his general practitioner, who did an ultrasound and thought Hans might have kidney stones.

The GP sent Hans on his way, telling him to monitor the situation.

When the pain got much worse in mid-2021, Gill pushed Hans towards a different GP, and that doctor — suspecting appendicitis — referred him to a hospital emergency department.

Doctors there wanted to send him home, saying “you’re young, you’re fit”.

“But I’m like, ‘yeah — he’s young, he’s fit, and he’s in pain’,” Gill says, a lump in her throat.

She told Hans not to leave until doctors performed a CT scan, and the call about the mass in his bowel came a couple of hours later, in the middle of the night.

Hans had no exposure to cancer growing up, and so when doctors said, “stage four,” several hours after a diagnostic procedure, Gill had to be the first to tell him what it meant. He broke down, saying, “Gill, I don’t want to die.”

“I shouldn’t have been the one to explain that to him,” Gill says.

“It added to the trauma of it all.”

Gill gets a little quieter and more considered when she tells me what dealing with the hospital system during COVID-19 was like. It’s clear that she and Hans found it painful with restrictions and burnt-out staff, but she knows so many other people were also struggling at the time.

“It was very rare that we felt that people felt for us,” she says.

Gill says she had to consistently advocate for Hans to get him what he needed.

Hans’ cancer had already spread to his peritoneum, the tissue that surrounds abdominal organs, by the time he was diagnosed.

Gill Malona with Hans Su in hospital in October 2022. 

He went through chemotherapy for about a year in an attempt to tackle it, and in January 2022, he was due for what is known as the “Mother of All Surgeries” – however, it had already spread too far for surgeons to remove all of it.

After that surgery failed and doctors told Hans he was terminal, Gill was adamant about getting pregnant. Hans was hesitant as it meant going through IVF.

“[I said], ‘we have always wanted kids and I will do it. Even when you die, I will do it’,” Gill says.

She hoped Hans would be able to meet their child before he died, and found out she was pregnant in July 2022.

At the time, they were preparing to travel to see a specialist surgeon in Sydney, where Gill went back and forth from the hospital to her accommodation each day.

But after a month, doctors had exhausted their options. Gill and Hans flew by air ambulance back to Melbourne, where Hans stayed in hospital for about six weeks.

The couple went home together, and Hans died through voluntary assisted dying on October 15, 2022.

His urn was in the delivery room when Gill gave birth to Olivia in April 2023.

Gill Malona and Hans Su in their home nursery in October 2022.

Gill says the sadness that comes with grief is the easiest part, and the secondary losses — the littlest things — are the hardest, like having to mow their lawn or having no choice but to ask family and friends for help.

“You lose the parts of them that they used to do,” Gill says.

She tells me she and Hans got through some of their hardest times with dark humour, from Hans joking he could be taxidermied, or promising to send her “someone hot” from beyond the grave.

When Hans was still alive, Gill sought out community groups for young widows but struggled to find anything based in Australia.

“I remember not being allowed in one because he wasn’t dead yet. I got rejected,” she says, breaking into incredulous laughter.

“But yes, it’s been really hard to find a community within my age group because it’s so different.”

Gill has since started The Wid Society, which she wants to use to share the reality of grief, and encourage people to reach out to those who’ve lost someone close to them.

“The culture is just, ‘we don’t talk about difficult things’, but in that process, that person feels abandoned,” Gill says.

Lunch at Roast’d (the owners, who went to Gill Malona and Hans Su’s wedding, threw in a free prawn dish and pork wontons without warning).Credit: Cassandra Morgan

“You bringing it up acknowledges that it’s real and it happened. I feel the way I do because it was real.”

Gill wishes she and Hans went to the city more to try restaurants because he was a big foodie. She wishes more people her age had a better balance between their careers and spending time with those they love.

“The things that really matter in the end are things that you can’t buy,” she says.

“If I died today, would I be happy with how I’ve spent my time?”

After Gill and I finish our meal, she goes out to the kitchen to say goodbye to Lor, and promises Wannika she’ll bring her daughter to the restaurant soon.

She’s headed home to the place she and Hans built for now, but she’s thinking of moving closer to the beach, where she and Olivia can enjoy the sand and waves—wet weather or not.

Tomorrow Funerals’ podcast Life & Death, Today & Tomorrow is on YouTube.