Glasto in a wheelchair? No big deal for my boy!
FROM the moment my baby son was put into my arms I was in love with him. He had a mop of blond hair and the most beautiful face.
I hadn’t known until then that he had spina bifida, a deformity of the spine, but I didn’t care. To me he was perfect.
Francis packed more into his short life than most able-bodied people. From the moment he understood that he’d always be in a wheelchair, he just accepted it. ‘You’ve just got to get on with it, Mum,’ he’d tell me.
And get on with it he did: first at school, then at university, and later in his job as a youth worker.
In between he developed a love for travel that took him all over this country and to America. Every year, he went to the Glastonbury Festival. Just the thought of it brought me out in hives but he loved it.
Francis was always trying new things. One time he came home in a Suzuki jeep — a far cry from the specially adapted car he usually drove.
‘How on earth are you going to get in and out of that?’ I asked him. ‘With difficulty,’ he replied with a grin.
At 24, he married the love of his life Heather, a nurse, and they went on to foster children. That was Francis through and through — though he faced so many trials of his own, and was in and out of hospital all his life, his instinct was to help other people.
He had always known that he wouldn’t reach old age. ‘Mum, you know I won’t grow old don’t you,’ he used to tell me.
Even so, it was a cruel blow when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer shortly after his 40th birthday. Of course, he accepted it with equanimity and courage, seizing life with both hands: I remember him calling me from the Big Wheel — a ferris wheel — in Liverpool shortly after he was diagnosed. ‘Guess where I am, Mum?’ he laughed.
A few months before he died he was best man at his younger brother Anthony’s wedding, and was determined to attend his sister Joanne’s 40th birthday even though he was in great pain.
He died four weeks later, leaving us all bereft. He was my hero. Francis roberts, born May 21, 1973, died June 16, 2017, aged 44.