Mel Schilling appears on screens for the final heartbreaking time

MAFS’ Mel Schilling is on our screens for the last time tonight. It feels like a gut punch.

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Mel Schilling will be on TV for the last time on Monday night, giving advice and much-needed insight as one of the three experts on Married At First Sight.

We’ve been privy to 10 years of her wisdom, so even though we didn’t know her personally, the feelings, the grief, the strangeness of her being onscreen but not physically here, still hits oddly hard.

We know it’s common to feel a sense of loss when someone on television passes away.

They’ve been in our lounge rooms, sometimes even on our phones, while we lie in bed, and they feel like a friend. The fact that Mel was known by her nickname and not Melanie, speaks to that. But there was something about Mel that was comforting and funny and deeply familiar all at once, despite, or maybe because she was never afraid to call things how she saw them.

Mel had earned that level of directness as a psychologist and relationship coach with over 20 years experience. And we were grateful for it. Honestly, sometimes we needed it, like when the “he said she said” shenanigans would start up on the couch and it felt like we were living in a different reality to the participants.

That’s when Mel would gracefully, but firmly say something like “That’s a problem” or this year’s absolute doozy, when she told Juliette, “Don’t speak over Alessandra! Show some respect!”

It was clear, from the tributes by Alessandra Rampolla, John Aiken and her UK counterparts, that she was not just respected but very loved. That part hurts, too. As does the knowledge that she was only 53 and leaving behind a husband, Gareth Brisbane, who clearly worshipped her and a daughter, Maddie, who is just 10 years old.

It’s a gut punch.

We might not have known Mel but almost everyone has someone they’re related to or worked with or did life with – someone they love – who has been touched by cancer.

Mel’s death is a reminder, as if we needed one, that really s***ty things happen to good people. And they seem to happen sometimes, right out of the blue.

We experienced the same type of shock and grief when Masterchef’s Jock Zonfrillo died at 46 in 2023 and Matthew Perry, who had not been on TV for decades, died at just 54 that same year. Then when Catherine O’Hara and Diane Keaton passed away recently.

Listen: Mel Schilling’s work raising awareness of colon cancer is a legacy we’re holding close today. Post continues below.

How can it be that the person, right in our home all the time, regular as clockwork, reliable as dinner on the table, is not here with us anymore?

It’s compounded by the fact that they were fighting a battle we knew little about.

Though she had been open about her bowel cancer diagnosis in the past, this time it wasn’t until late March that she told us the devastating truth: the cancer was now in its final stages. Just 11 days later she was gone.

So to see Mel on TV, acting funny and direct and glamorous, too, even though we never really knew her, or any of those famous names, for that matter, will be bittersweet.

It might be odd to mourn a stranger but it doesn’t change the fact that they were real people, and they were in our lives. And now they’re gone. And that part of us that felt a little lighter when they were in that show, in our homes, during a time when nothing feels certain, is allowed to grieve.