In the eighteen months since I lost my mum, I have experienced a certain level of emptiness that most young adults might never feel. That emptiness keeps me up at night, stops me in the street, affects my relationships and is now a part of who I am. My name is Helen, I’m 19 years old, and when I was 18, my mum died of cancer. This is my story.
Cholangiocarcinoma – confusing, hard to communicate, unusual, the word is everything that the cancer was. It’s cancer of the bile duct. I still find it near impossible to think about losing mum without feeling like I am breaking in half. When I meet new people, especially those who are, or will be, important in my life, I dread telling them.
Me. I don’t have a mum. At least not one I can hug when I’m sad, or call up when I get a promotion, or laugh with at Christmas. Of course I still have a mum, and I will forever have the memories of the 18 glorious years I spent with my beautiful, brilliant best friend. But the physical space she took up in my life is now a gaping hole. After the surgery she had to remove the majority of the tumour, mum had a large scar on her stomach. It kept getting infected and never properly healed. She could never have radiotherapy because it kept opening and preventing anything from progressing.
In fact, mum was really lucky. Cancer of the bile duct is rare and almost impossible to cure. She lived nearly two years from her original diagnosis, and was relatively healthy in that time. She fought incredibly hard and was an inspiration to everyone who met her. She even found the strength to run a charity 5K, to raise money for Mary Ann Evans Hospice. Her death was not painful or stressful, but quiet and peaceful, surrounded by her family – who were indeed her whole world. At her funeral, the church was fuller than it had possibly ever been, and thousands of pounds were raised for Cancer Research UK, who continue to work incredibly hard to find a cure for cancer.
2016 was a horrible year. It was the first full year without mum. The first year she didn’t live through, at all. The first of every anniversary is the worst – I knew that would be the case before I experienced any of them. But now, in 2017, all of the first anniversaries are gone. I’ve survived them all. And having just had the second Christmas without mum, I’m not optimistic. The second anniversary is pretty bad too, because that is when you realise that the last one wasn’t a one off, or a mistake. It was the cold reality of the future. She didn’t just miss last Christmas. She will miss every Christmas.
World Cancer Day yesterday really made me stop and think about everyone else going through the same difficult days I go through – but it also made me realize how lucky I am to have an amazing father and two siblings who I love dearly. Perhaps God only takes the best ones to make the rest of the family stronger. All I know is I love my mum, and miss her with all my heart.
