How do you cope with the death of a child? Liz Hands speaks to one mum about life after the ultimate loss

WHEN Christopher Lucas died just as he should have been starting his journey into adult- hood, his parents sat down and discussed using his medication to end their own lives.

Feeling they could not go on without their “gorgeous” boy, Chris’s mum and dad, both called Lynn, came close to what they describe as the easy way out.

However, deciding they had no choice but to stay strong for their younger son David, who was just 15 at the time, they ploughed all their emotions into raising money for research into the aggressive cancer which took Chris’s life at the age of 18.

Eleven years down the line, as they prepare to hit the £1m fundraising mark through the charity set up in his name, Chris’s mum has become an inspiration for other parents going through their own darkest days.

Chris, from Hadrian Park, Wallsend, was just 15 when he started to get pains down his left side.

“He was a paperboy,” says his mum, “and we thought the bag was too heavy for him. Then he started to lose weight. We thought it was just puppy fat going. You never for one moment imagine it will be something so terrible.” After numerous visits to GPs, Chris was referred to North Tyneside Hospital where medics said he had a problem with one of his kidneys.

“I thought, ‘That’s fine, he’ll be OK, he can just have one of mine’,” says Lynn. But Chris was rushed to Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary where he was diagnosed with an inoperable tumour.

He had the most advanced stage of a rare form of tissue-wasting cancer, Rhabdomyosarcoma. Because the tumour had wrapped itself around his internal organs, it could not be removed and Chris’s parents were told they had just five precious years left with their son.

There followed gruelling rounds of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and clinical trials which caused side- effects so severe it was feared Chris could have to have a skin graft. He also had to have splints on his legs after the treatment left one foot dragging lower than the other.

GCSE exams were written not at Willington High School, where he had been a pupil, but from his hospital bed, and he spent nights being fed through a tube.

But it all seemed to be worth it when, a year later, scans showed Chris’s tumour was gone.

“It felt like winning the lottery,” said Lynn. “We were dancing down the hospital corridors.”

Chris completed a City and Guilds course, secured a job as a graphic designer and passed his driving test. Life seemed to be returning to normal. “We got him a little Citroen Saxo,” says Lynn. “We had no money but we got up to our necks in debt to get him that car. Then he started to get pains in his shoulder. We thought it was because we hadn’t been able to afford to get him the power-steering model. But he died just after his 18th birthday.” The disease had returned with a vengeance. Chris found more lumps and doctors discovered cancer modules in his lungs.

Throughout it all, Lynn never told her son how bad his prognosis was. “He died on July 15, 2000,” she says. “He had been due to go on his first lads’ holiday to Benidorm on July 20 but we never talked about him not being able to go. I still bought him the new suitcase, the travel hairdryer. We bought him a couple of Fred Perry tops. But he never got to wear them on holiday. Instead, he was buried in one.”

Lynn believes youngsters should never be told they are going to die.

“I don’t think he would have achieved what he did in the time he had left if we hadn’t kept him positive,” she says. “When we were feeding him through a tube, he would say he thought he didn’t have long, but I’d just shake my head and say, ‘No, son, who told you that?’”

Chris deteriorated quickly in the week that led up to his death, falling ill on Monday and passing away in hospital on Saturday morning.

“He turned to me on Friday and asked if he had to stay in another night,” says Lynn. “Those were the last words he spoke.”