Alice's Bucket List

We'll be back to regularly scheduled programming soon, but I had to write about this today.

Alice Pyne is a girl my age, we would have been in the same school year. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer over five years ago and, in 2011, started writing her blog "Alice's Bucket List".

Alice made a list of things that she wanted to do before she died. And they weren't all the most cliché, selfless, acts of Kindness and Benevolence that the image of cancer patients, strengthened and given wisdom by their illness we get in the media would make us expect. She was just a normal teenage girl. She wanted to meet Take That. She wanted to go to Alton Towers. She wanted to have a photo shoot with her dog.

She wanted to go to prom.

When Alice started writing, in 2011, she celebrated Christmas in November, because she wasn't sure she would last another Christmas that year. Throughout last year, she started working on a goal to get everyone to sign up for bone marrow registration, involving fundraising, and a campaign for Hallmark to print messages on the back of eighteenth birthday cards. She started a charity called Alice's Escapes, facilitating free holidays to families with a seriously or terminally ill child.

Here is the British Bone Marrow Registry. Alice's sister, Milly, is climbing Kilimanjaro, this October to raise funds for Alice's Escapes, and you can sponsor her here.

The work she did, everything towards this cause, is amazing. Not from a sympathetic point of view, not because she had cancer, they're just amazing things for a human to do in general. She also made two Christmasses more than she thought that she would, back in 2011. She also went to prom.

If you read her blog, you'll see that she stayed incredibly positive until the very last minute.

"I'm not eating as much as I should so mum and dad keep making silly things with my food - yesterday, for lunch I got a bagel with Baybel eyes on top and french fries sticking out the sides of the bagel - that was their idea of a spider. I am beginning to think that we are like care in the community and that they need help too LOL."

She died yesterday. Her mum wrote this post.

Having never met her, and only having read her blog, it's strange to think about how weak she must have been towards the end, because she never seemed it when she wrote. She was always, always excited about something that was happening, things for her charity, seeing Robbie Williams, going to Center Parcs. On her blog, she never complained. She never talked about unfair it was that this was happening to her. I can't imagine how strong the temptation must have been.

My thoughts are with her family. They should be so proud.

"You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments you cannot even imagine yet."- "The Fault in Our Stars", John Green