When you realize that you don’t have much time to live, it can be a hard pill to swallow, and understandably so. After the initial shock wears off, most people opt to live their life to the fullest. Some create “bucket lists” and tick them off one by one, while others choose to leave memories behind in the form of letters or notes for their loved ones to cherish. Rowena Darby did exactly that. She wanted to ensure that her son had things to remember her by after she was diagnosed with cancer, and had only a couple of years to live.
Rowena gave birth to Freddie in June 2010, but that very year, in the month of October, she began to experience tremendous pain in her body. “The doctors still said it was piles or a fissure and gave me strong painkillers. Six months later, I had an internal investigation that found nothing, but I was still in pain,” Rowena said, according to a report by the Daily Mail. “Then in May 2011, I had a colonoscopy (an examination of the colon) and I knew immediately that something was wrong because it was really painful. More scans followed. In June 2011 – a week before Freddie’s first birthday – I was told I had cancer.”
The doctors had a grim prognosis: she had only two years left to live. She was heartbroken but made the steely resolve of not wasting time wallowing in self-pity; instead, she invested her time and energy left into her son’s life. “I couldn’t waste any time crying,” she said. “Of course, there have been tears and the last thing I want to do is leave Freddie. But I can’t let my time be taken up by being upset because what good is it going to do? The important thing is to spend time with Freddie, give him lots of lovely memories and make sure he can cope when I’m no longer around.”
She raised some money by making bracelets and selling them. Her husband Phil also helped her out, and together they were able to take little Freddie on holidays and make some memories together. Rowena added, “I know a lot of people in my situation create a bucket list but I just want to be a mum and do normal stuff with my son,” as reported by The Bolton News.
In 2013, when Freddie was just about 3-years-old, Rowenna began putting together emails and cars for her son. Not only did she write cards for all his birthdays till he turned 21, but she also made special cards for all the other milestones in his life that he would soon experience like his first day at school, his graduation day and even his wedding day. “He doesn’t know I’m going to die because he doesn’t understand what dying is yet. But the other day he said: ‘Mummy I don’t like it when you go into hospital because I miss you.’ It broke my heart,” she said.
It was only a matter of time where she would not be physically present in his life, and wouldn’t be able to comfort, talk or even hug him in his hour of need. Thus, she hoped that these cards would help guide him in her absence. “That’s why I want to be able to give him these cards – so he can look at them when he wants to feel me near to him and know just how much I love him,” she said. “When he’s ten, he’ll get one that says: ‘Life is ten percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we react to it,’ because by that stage, he might be struggling to deal with the fact that I’m not there,” the mother went on to say. “On his wedding day, he has one that says: ‘Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.’ I know it’s not the same as me being there in person, but I hope it helps him know how much I love him.”
His mother also left him a teddy bear and told him that speaking to it would directly convey messages to her anytime he felt like talking to her. “I’ve told Freddie that his teddy bear has a hotline to Mummy for when I’m not there,” Rowena said. “So, he talks to him and can tell him anything he wants – and I’ve told him his teddy will pass it on to me, no matter where I am.”
On December 29, 2014, Rowena passed away at the age of 34, surrounded by her loved ones. “Being a mother was all she ever wanted from life and to have had that taken away from her was a particularly cruel thing to happen,” her husband said. “That’s why she was as determined as she was to be alive as long as she could and to create memories to preserve her legacy for Freddie. She was an amazing mum. I always knew she would be.”
