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.
“Watching all that unfold, those effects continue for so long.”
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.
So how would he feel about her donning the red-and-white guernsey?
“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.
When she opted to pursue Aussie rules, he told her he used to be the captain of his club.
Smith is now determined to use the harrowing family chapter to inspire change, featuring in a Heart Foundation fundraising campaign, We’re All In, for research initiatives.
While survival rates have improved, heart disease remains one of Australia’s biggest killers, claiming about 115 lives daily, while the foundation’s State of the Heart Survey 2025 revealed 70 per cent of people did not consider heart disease to be a relevant concern at their stage of life.
As Smith reveals, the most frustrating part of the loss was that her mum had regularly insisted he “go get your heart checked”, with the response often being “I’m healthy”.
The 26-year-old recalls filming the campaign, and throughout the day feeling strong and excited by the message she was sharing. The next day, she broke down.
“I just crashed and burned because the reality of saying ‘I lost my dad to a heart attack’ multiple times to get the right shot really hit me. I was emotional, but it was also quite empowering to know what was going to come from my vulnerability,” Smith says.
“Hopefully, it will save a few lives. If it saves two lives it means all those family members related to that person don’t have to go through what my family went through.”
Smith and the Swans will seek to remain unbeaten in the AFLW campaign when they clash with Essendon on Sunday.
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