Before my 19-year-old son died, he donated his heart to an 18-year-old girl — after the transplant, her mother handed me a letter from my son that began, “Mom, there’s something you need to know about her.”
My husband died in 2016, so I brought Cian up on my own.
He was all I had. I want that understood before anything else in this, because everything I did afterwards came out of it.
In the March of 2024 he was eighteen, six foot one, and had not had so much as a chest infection since he was eleven.
And one Tuesday afternoon he went dizzy at the bus stop and went down on the pavement.
Six weeks of tests. Three hospitals. And then a consultant in a room with a box of tissues on the desk, telling me my son had a rare progressive neurological condition, and that there was no cure, and that the question was not whether but how long.
