Daffodils and Freesias

Today will be my nephew's funeral. My heart is heavy that I can't be there, but hopefully my family knows that all my love is there with them.

My dear friend Jenny sent me this message today, which I found very touching.

"Someone was telling me a few days ago about daffodils as a flower of remembrance and I thought of you and Kyton. It'd be too late in the year this year to plant them I think. But apparently the bulbs you plant divide every year and flower again, so the flowers you plant could still be coming up every year for 100 years from the same bulbs. And it also fits with him being born so close to St David's day."

I think it's a wonderful idea. Okay, we rent the house we live in so probably won't be here for decades, but most people don't have the "family homestead" anymore where generation after generation live. But the daffodils will be there year after year, and every time I see daffodils somewhere else, they would remind me of Kyton.

Another of my lovely friends, Vicki, brought me some beautiful white freesias as a gesture of sympathy this week. They were such a thoughtful gesture that, when I was ordering flowers for Kyton's funeral, I chose a basket with freesias. It turns out those are some of my sister Shannon's favourite flowers.




So I can't be at the funeral today, but I'm going to find a part of our garden to set aside for Kyton's Flowers. And I will do the same wherever I live in the future. In the future the people who live in this house might not know the significance but they can still enjoy their beauty.

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Kyton Allen Rice Bowman

My intention was to give people a chance to recover from Christmas, have a couple of paydays under their belts and make up a bit of the shortfalls in their bank accounts before I started hounding everyone in cyberspace for donations to my fundraiser.

Isn't life strange. I was all ready to spend Sunday preparing a blog about how wonderfully my sister Erin is doing with her cancer treatment.

And she is! She has her last chemo treatment on 16 March, an MRI on 21 March and and appointment with a plastic surgeon on 7 March. Because of the generous people who have given donations in the past that have helped to research treatments, my sister is looking at a long and healthy life ahead of her. I know there is still a long way to go, but there is something to be said for the power of positive thinking!

So why didn't I spend Sunday preparing a blog that would have updated everyone on Erin's progress and stunned you all with my mediocrity? Why did I not badger celebrities on Twitter to retweet the link to my fundraising page to help me get closer to my target? Because life is a story filled with joys and tragedies, routines and the unexpected, beautiful highs and devastating lows, and on Sunday my family was dealt one on these previously unimaginable lows.

Erin is a twin. She and Shannon look nothing like each other (they once won a county fair "Most Different Twins" contest, and Shannon actually looks more like me than like Erin) and they act nothing like each other.

Shannon found out recently that she was expecting my most recent nephew with her partner Ross. I was looking forward to meeting the newest member of our family when I travel to the US for my son's wedding. But it just wasn't meant to be. I woke up Sunday morning to the news that, at 21 weeks, Shannon had gone into premature labour that they weren't able to stop, and on Monday 28 February at 4.05 pm, Kyton Allen Ross Bowman was born. His parents had a few precious hours with him before he left this world that his poor little body just wasn't ready for.

My partner David had some beautiful words about Kyton.

"Kyton Allen Rice Bowman - the smallest & brightest stars last the shortest time. He came into this world had time for one dream then left before the world could dim his shine. Sleep well."

Do I still want to ask you all to make a donation to my Cancer Research UK fundraiser? Absolutely. But if you don't want to make a donation to such a worthy cause, consider making a donation to a local neonatal unit so that, in the future, little ones like Kyton might have more of a chance to grow up.

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