I'll Never Forget What I've Lost

Blinded by grief after losing her daughter, followed two years later by her husband, Deborah Binner has learnt to live and love again

- Pam Francis

Everyone understands the monotony of Christmas Day, it’s endearing really – the same routines and traditions. ours was no different. Every year the moment we’d sit down to lunch, my daughter Chloe and my husband Simon would grab the Christmas crackers as though it was a race. I can still picture the two of them now. Simon would always let her win. Christmas Day is unrecognisable now and both of those seats are empty.

I was a 36-year-old single mother to Hannah, then eight, and Chloe, five, when I met Simon at a dinner party. He had a daughter, Zoe, then 11, and as far as blended families go, for us, it just seemed to work. We got married in 2002, with the three girls as bridesmaids, and our family life was perfect. The girls squabbled like sisters, but made up like them, too. We were all happy. But that’s the cruel thing with cancer, it always seems to strike when you least expect it.

Chloe was just 15 when she started complaining of a pain in her right leg. I assumed it was just a pulled muscle – after all, Chloe was always running around, she could never sit still. But it didn’t go away. Four months later, she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma, which affects only 35 children a year in the UK. As a journalist I’d covered stories about teenage cancer, but it always felt like a parallel universe that had nothing to do with me. Now I couldn’t believe what was happening.

With cancer, the landscape of your life changes and your perception of the world shifts, too. Stupid things that used to bother you like losing weight or getting promoted at work no longer matter.