The moment my daughter took her last breath, a part of me died with her. I felt grief and relief collide in my chest as I held her hand, watching the light fade from eyes that had once lit up every room. She was only forty.
A mother, a fighter, a voice for so many. Now her children, just teenagers, wake to a world without her laugh, her texts, her messy, wonderful love. I replay her final days, the quiet courage, the whispered jokes through the pain. I wonder how you go on when the person who taught you to live is gone. I wonder how you explain to a child that their hero isn’t coming ba…
I remember the first time I held her, a tiny, furious bundle demanding to be heard. Decades later, I held that same hand as she slipped away, her body broken by a disease she faced with impossible grace.
Between those two moments stretched a life lived loudly: her Bowelbabe blog, the campaigns, the way she turned her own fear into fuel for others. She refused to be just a patient; she became a movement.
Now, in the quiet after the storm, grief arrives in waves—for me, and most painfully for Hugo and Eloise. They’ve lost their mother; I’ve lost my daughter, and yet her presence is everywhere.
In their resilience. In every story shared by someone she helped. We honor her not by pretending we’re okay, but by doing exactly what she taught us: squeezing joy out of ordinary days, loving outrageously, and never wasting a moment we’re given.
