Too Young To Die

My oldest Nephew found out one of his best friends who has been fighting leukaemia the last 10 years has just been told treatment has failed this time around and he has only a few weeks to live.  He's only 16.

It's such an unbelievable thing to grasp, I mean here I am contemplating and complaining about my life and there he is a boy who hasn't yet had the chance to live his life being told that he only has a few weeks of time left.  

I contemplated giving this boy a name and calling him Peter Parker due to the the looming death of Spiderman in the latest DC comic book, but somehow  masking him in any respect doesn't seem right so today, for the first time I'm going to give you everything because this is one young lad who I take my hat off to in every respect, he is a hero in his own right and he absolutely should not be counting down his final days.

Harvey.

Sixteen is no age for anyone to die, in fact it has to be one of the worst ages to be told you don't have any longer to live.  You are old enough to know all of the things you will miss out on and too young to have experienced most if not all of them.  Harvey will never get drunk, go to University, graduate, get his first flat, have a long-term girlfriend, feel the dread when he meets her parents for the first time, propose, get married, have children, hold his child in his arms, lose his virginity, get his first job, be fired, quit a job, learn to drive, go to a nightclub and dance till 3am... I could go on for hours and hours about the things the rest of us take for granted and Harvey gets to experience none of it.  Last week he missed his high-school prom as he was in hospital being pumped full of drugs.

If there was a machine that I could walk into and it would take whatever life I have left and give it to him I would, no second thoughts, no deliberation.  At sixteen its just too unfair, at least at 29 I've been able to taste life and grab a handful of firsts.  I can't even imagine how his parents are feeling.  They must be devastated because not only do they have to deal with losing their son, but they have to watch it happen knowing that there is nothing in the whole world they can do to fix it.

When my nephew had his 16th birthday Harvey came along and spent the day, live everyone else,  paintballing.  No hiding from life, no being careful,  Harvey just padded himself up and ran about like he hadn't a care in the world.  A few weeks earlier had just had a bone marrow transplant and things were looking good, and yet now, just a few months later life has been snatched from his grasp again and everything has changed.  Is Harvey complaining about it? Not really.  His facebook is honest, open and not once does he say how unfair the whole thing is.

I'm not one for believing in god or the afterlife or anything, but when it comes to things like this I'm willing to give anything and everything a go because no way does this little boy deserve to die, he hasn't yet had a chance to live. 

So if you read this, I don't care who you are, what you do, where you live or anything else, send a thought for Harvey, make a wish and catch a shooting star that if nothing else he utterly defies this prognosis and gets to live at least a few more years so at the very least he can grab a taste of life.

No song today, just a snippet taken from Harvey's facebook:

Forget turtles, I love broccoli, just sat there all like  "Hey I'm a broccoli, I'm just gonna sit here pretending to be a miniature tree, I know my colours aren't quite right for a tree but I don't mind because I'm easy-going. Doesn't matter if you don't want to eat me, it's all cool, I'm not that nice anyway, and I'm content practising my tree pose"