\u201cI brought my daughter into the world and took her out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
As I held Deborah\u2019s hand as she took her last breath, I was both sad and relieved. My beautiful whirlwind of a girl was gone, and so was her pain.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to be a mom to a dead child every day, but tomorrow is especially hard.<\/p>\n
Even though one of my children has died, I\u2019ll always be a mom of three. But today, I\u2019m thinking about my 16-year-old and 14-year-old grandchildren, Hugo and Eloise, who have lost their wonderful mother.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not okay for them to send her a card or gift or just let her hug them.
\nToday, like every day for the past 21 months, all I can do is love them and be there for them.<\/p>\n
Five and a half years after being told she had bowel cancer, my oldest daughter, Dame Deborah James, died. She was 40 years old.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s still hard to believe that the world has gone on without her. She was such a force of nature from the time she was a little girl.<\/p>\n
Deborah was diagnosed in December 2016, when she was 35 years old and had two kids, ages 9 and 7.<\/p>\n
She was a healthy, active young woman who didn\u2019t smoke or eat meat. But she was losing weight, having bloody stools, and feeling tired.<\/p>\n
At first, it was thought to be stress or IBS, so hearing that she had bowel cancer was very upsetting.<\/p>\n
But I thought she would have surgery and chemotherapy and then be fine again soon.<\/p>\n
There were more tests and a few weeks passed before I was shocked to hear that the cancer was in its fourth stage.<\/p>\n
Deborah was brave and determined, which didn\u2019t surprise me at all; that was just how she was.<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t just want to deal with her own illness; she also wanted to help other people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cI brought my daughter into the world and took her out of it.\u201d As I held Deborah\u2019s hand as she took her last breath, I was both… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1195,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n