Would you tell your child that they were dying? Sarah Pullen chose not to. Instead, she surrounded her son Silas with love, laughter, and hope — even giving his brain tumour a name, something she shares in her deeply moving book.
The article tells the story of Sarah, who lost her eleven-year-old son Silas to GBM in December 2013. Silas passed away less than eighteen months after being diagnosed, when doctors told his parents that there was no cure. Sarah later wrote a book called A Mighty Boy, which she hopes will raise awareness and bring comfort to other families facing the same heartbreak. All proceeds from the book will go to The Brain Tumour Charity.
“When you hear the word cancer, you think there must be many treatments,” says Sarah. “I didn’t know there were still cancers that couldn’t be cured. I had no idea that brain cancer takes more children’s lives than meningitis. I couldn’t accept that there was no cure for Silas, but from the very beginning, we were told he would die. There were no clinical trials available, and the medicines used for brain cancer hadn’t changed in forty years. I couldn’t believe it.”
Life goes on, and Sarah tries to focus on what lies ahead. “After Silas died, I became so protective of my other children. I kept thinking, ‘I couldn’t survive if it happened again.’ But you have to let children take risks, to live freely in the moment,” she says.
“The pain of losing a child never disappears — you just learn how to carry it. Grief comes in waves, and over time, those waves become less frequent. At the very start, I even found myself wishing for Silas’s pain to end. As a parent, you’d do anything to save your child from suffering. But as hard as it was to watch him fade away, I’d go through it all again just to have one more day with him — one more chance to make memories.”
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