Nine-year-old Bailey Cooper managed to get to know the baby. And he asked his parents to cry for him no longer than twenty minutes.
Is 15 months a lot or a little? It depends on why. Not enough for happiness. For parting – a lot. Bailey Cooper battled cancer for 15 months. The lymphoma was discovered when it was too late to do anything about it. Metastases spread throughout the child’s body. No, this does not mean that relatives and doctors did not try. We tried. But it was impossible to help the boy. 15 months to fight a deadly disease is a lot. 15 months to say goodbye to your dying child is unbearable.
The doctors gave Bailey much less time. He should have died six months ago. But his mom, Rachel, was pregnant with her third child. And Bailey was determined to live to see the baby.
“The doctors said that he would not last until his sister was born. We ourselves did not believe, Bailey was already fading away. But our boy was fighting. He instructed us to call him as soon as the baby was born, ”said Lee and Rachel, the boy’s parents.
Christmas was approaching. Will Bailey live to see the holiday? Hardly. But his parents still asked him to write a letter to Santa. The boy wrote. Only the list did not contain those gifts that he himself would have dreamed of. He asked for things that would please his younger brother, six-year-old Riley. And he himself continued to wait for a meeting with his sister.
And finally the girl was born. The brother and sister met.
“Bailey did everything that the older brother had to do: changed the diaper, washed, sang her a lullaby,” Rachel recalls.
The boy did everything he wanted: he survived all the doctors’ predictions, won his fight against death, saw his little sister and came up with a name for her. The girl was named Millie. And after that, Bailey began to fade away before our eyes, as if after he had achieved his goal, he had no reason to hold on to life.
“This is so unfair. I should have been in his place, ”the brave boy’s grandmother cried. And he told her that you can’t be so selfish, because she still has grandchildren to take care of – Riley and little Millie.
Bailey even left an order on how his funeral should go. He wanted everyone to dress up in superhero costumes. He strictly forbade his parents to cry for more than 20 minutes. After all, they should focus on his sister and brother.
On December 22, a month after Millie was born, Bailey was taken to a hospice. On Christmas Eve, everyone gathered at his bedside. The boy looked at the faces of his family for the last time, sighed for the last time.
“A single tear rolled out from under his eyelids. He seemed to be asleep. ” Relatives try not to cry. After all, Bailey himself asked for this.