My five amazing reasons for £500k charity fundraiser
OK, what can we do next? People survive this, why shouldn’t Oscar?’”
He was given experimental drugs, but they could not save him and Oscar passed away at home in May 2014.
Marie said: “We didn’t lose hope until the very end. We thought, ‘Something is going to come up, something magical is going to happen’.
“Had I known he would die, there were some things [treatment] I wouldn’t have let him go through.
“At the very end, it was just Ian and me. I sang him a Danish lullaby I used to sing to him when he was little, and he liked that. We talked to him.” Just months later, Marie was stunned to discover she was pregnant again and Milo was born in September 2015.
She said: “It was a strange time after Oscar died. Couples can move away from each other, or towards each other. We needed each other a lot and then came Milo.
QUESTIONS
“He came along and we just came alive again. You couldn’t do anything but love him. It changed our lives.
“He knew about Oscar and often talked about him. He would ask questions about him.” But towards the end
of 2018, Marie began to notice that Ian, who had already survived stomach cancer against the odds, was acting strangely. It was the first sign of the effects of the brain tumour.
He was diagnosed with a terminal glioblastoma tumour in February 2019 and died in a hospice in January 2020, with Marie and Seb by his side, listening to a playlist he had picked for his final moments.
Ian took his last breaths to Elbow’s One Day Like This – a track he had also chosen for his funeral.
Marie said: “It was our song. We both loved it so much. He had the best death we could give him.” Just weeks later, disaster struck again. Marie noticed Milo was retching and lacking in energy.
She said: “I walked into A&E and said, ‘My child has got a brain tumour’. I knew the signs straight away. A nurse came and they did a scan.”
Milo was diagnosed with multiple brain tumours and, shortly afterwards, Marie was given the crushing news his condition was also terminal.
She said: “The oncologist said, ‘Shall we let Milo play and you come with me?’ I looked at her, and I knew.
“I had to talk to Seb and Lucas. I said, ‘It’s very likely Milo will die’.
“You feel very helpless. There is so much you want to do, and it just doesn’t work.”
The family focused on making Milo’s last months as happy as possible – and in the midst of their devastation the youngster still managed to make them smile. Marie added: “Towards the very end, where I didn’t think he was aware of what was going on any more, he was in my bed and he wasn’t moving so much. “I remember picking him up and holding him, and all of a sudden he started kissing me again.
“It’s hard to watch something like this overtake such strong boys.”
Marie is now looking to the future and says her surviving sons give her the strength to face the future.
She said: “Lucas, Seb and I can still make great memories.
“I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have the boys.
“They’re still here and they deserve to have a good life. That’s why I set up the charity. I can’t change what has happened but I can at least try to do my best for them.”