A 35-year-old woman who died from cancer earlier this month has penned her own touching obituary in which she proclaims ‘life was good’.
Bailey Jean Matheson, from Halifax, Canada, was diagnosed with a rare form of terminal cancer two years ago but decided she wanted to embrace life fully, with the time she had left.
Concerned about the side effects of chemo, she decided to skip therapy for her incurable disease and instead spend her remaining time on Earth travelling and spending her time with loved ones.
Bailey Jean Matheson, 35, was diagnosed with cancer two years ago and died April 5
Before she passed, she ended up writing her own obituary, full of advice for friends and family
’35 years may not seem long, but damn it was good!,’ her obituary, which was written by her and published in the Chronicle Herald, begins.
Matheson, who ran her own beauty business, went on to thank her parents for supporting her decision of not going through chemo after radiation treatment failed.
She said that as an only child she knew the decision wouldn’t be easy for them to accept.
‘I know how hard that must have been watching me stop treatment and letting nature take its course. I love you both even more for this,’ she said.
‘I’ve always cherished my friendships more than anything because I’ve never had siblings of my own,’ Matheson wrote.
‘I never thought I could love my friends more than I did but going through this and having your unconditional love and support you have made something that is normally so hard, more bearable and peaceful.’
Matheson got to travel to Europe with her boyfriend, Brent Andrews. A friend snapped this photo of the two of them in Seville (left), and they are pictured together (right)
‘I never thought I could love my friends more than I did but going through this and having your unconditional love and support you have made something that is normally so hard, more bearable and peaceful,’ she wrote. Matheson is pictured, left
Matheson, seen left, was an only child who ran her own beauty business. She said she cherished her friendships ‘more than anything’ because she never had siblings
She ended her obit by urging people around her to appreciate their own lives as well.
‘Don’t take the small stuff so seriously and live a little,’ she wrote.
She even managed a joke about her boyfriend whom she met on Tinder just months before her devastating diagnosis.
‘To my Brent… you had no idea what you were getting yourself into when you swiped right that day,’ she wrote.
In her final few months, Matheson got to see her favorite band, Coldplay, twice and traveled to 13 countries, including the U.S., Ireland, England, Norway, Croatia, Montenegro, St. Lucia, Mexico, France, Morocco, Greece, Portugal and Spain.
One of her best friends, Julie Carrigan, told Today that she wanted her obituary ‘to be a message to everybody I loved’, and not a ‘boring’ one.
‘She said, “I don’t want it to sound like a normal, boring obituary. I want it to be a message to everybody I loved,”” Carrigan said.
‘She ended up seeing the illness as like a blessing in disguise, in a way, because most people just go every day and take it for granted. And when you get diagnosed with something like that, there’s no taking it for granted anymore.
‘You just do everything you want to do and say everything you want to say,’ Carrigan added.
‘To my parents, thank you for supporting me and my decisions throughout my life,’ Matheson wrote. She is seen here pictured with her mother, Wendy Matheson
Matheson, right, would have been both ‘mortified and touched to know her last words are getting so much attention’, her friends said to the media
Matheson was very healthy and physically fit until she suddenly started complaining about stomach pain.
Doctors initially believed the pain was caused by muscle or back problems, but then she felt a lump on left side of her abdomen.
A biopsy allowed doctors to diagnose Matheson with leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer that affects smooth muscle tissue.
Doctors hoped to shrink the tumor with radiation but the treatment failed and surgery was thought to be too risky. She was given two years to live.
Although Chemotherapy was an option, it was thought unlikely to save her life. Not wanting to suffer from the side effects, Matheson declined the treatment.
‘She was worried that those two years — if she was going through chemo — her quality of life during that time wouldn’t be very good, so she just went for it and did a lot of stuff that she really wanted to do,’ her boyfriend Brent Andrews said.