A Mighty Boy

Book excerpt: Silas is ten years old when the headaches start. When the diagnosis arrives, his parents are told they have until Christmas... maybe. And so begins Sarah Pullen’s battle to save her son, against doubting doctors and insurmountable odds. This story about love and loss traces her family’s journey from that first day at the hospital, battling a tumour they named ‘Bob’, through Silas’s death and beyond. This profoundly moving and honest account shows that it is possible to find the strength for a journey that no mother should ever go on; that it is possible to find a new way to live, even when death is knocking on the door. It is about confronting grief – raw, ugly, incomprehensible grief. It is a book about wrapping a small boy in love, but still letting him get grubby knees. It is about learning to savour every moment of the here and now, yet also learning to let go. At its heart, A Mighty Boy is a story of the love between a mother and a son. It is a book about seizing the moment and somehow managing to survive the death of a child. But most of all it is a book about a small, mighty, smiling boy.