These special people helped Amanda - now we all have to support them

AMANDA Penney loved Christmas.

- JOSEPH TIMAN

"It was all the build-up of it," her husband Dave, 50, says. "But she knew time was running short.

"The cancer had progressed to her spine. She knew last Christmas was probably going to be her last." Six months after Amanda was first diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2018, doctors discovered that it had spread to her lungs. The terminal diagnosis that followed spurred on the Penney family, from Ramsbottom, to start spending Christmas in 'exotic' locations.

But after her final round of chemotherapy in November 2023, the family decided to spend what would probably be Amanda's last Christmas at home.

She cooked Christmas dinner, as she always did, but couldn't eat it, and that night she took a turn for the worse.

She was admitted to the Christie hospital on Boxing Day and spent the next few months in and out of the specialist cancer facility in Manchester until March, when the doctors suggested stopping all treatment. She was told she had two to four months left to live.

"On the day she left the Christie," Dave recalls, "she said, 'right, we're going to Bury Hospice to have a look around!

"In Amanda's mind, she was going to pass away at the Christie. She was adamant she didn't want to die at home." The 56-year-old, who worked at L'Oreal's Manchester Academy in Deansgate before moving to another beauty business, did not want her 15-year-old daughter Jess to associate the family home with death. "She wanted the house to be a happy place for Jess," Dave says.

Bury Hospice felt like a 'home from home! But in the end, Amanda spent less than a week at the facility - she died on March 20.

She was 'chatting' and 'giggling' when she arrived and was taken outside in a wheelchair to the oriental gardens on the grounds of the hospice before her condition deteriorated. "The sun was shining and she said she just wanted to feel the sun on her face," Dave says.