Mum was just getting her life back together, then it was snatched away
Shannon Brown, 30, Sunderland
Music blared and drinks flowed as I got ready for a night out with my friends – and my mum.
‘What do I wear, girls?’ she asked as I wrapped her hair around a curling iron.
‘One of my dresses,’ I grinned to her.
It was early 2013, I was 19 and my mum Michelle Hanson was 37.
But boy, did she know how to party!
I did her make-up, gave her a sparkly blue dress to wear, then we hit the club – where Mum was first on the dance floor.
‘Come on you lot!’ she called over to us.
I was lucky to have her. She was the life and soul – always had been.
Growing up, Mum inflated bouncy castles for me and my older brother, Steven, to play on, took me rock climbing and ice skating.
When I was 9, she and my dad split up.
Mum was heartbroken, but her sense of fun still shone, and during my school years she’d style my hair into eight pigtails.
‘I look like a spider,’ I moaned, embarrassed.
She’d sport wacky hairstyles herself, paint her 6 nails bright orange and yellow, and sing loudly walking down any street.
She didn’t give a toss, and that’s why I loved her.
Mum had Dave in 2005, and Tommy in 2007.
But when I was 17, we lost everything in a house fire, and my brothers, then aged 19, 6 and 4, went to live with their dads.
I went to my dad’s too, and at 19, got my own place.
Mum lived with our nana, before eventually moving into her own flat.
But after the fire, she suffered depression, struggled financially and had toxic relationships.
I’d pop round to find her black and blue.
‘What happened Mum?’ I’d cry.
She always brushed it off.
‘We just had a little fight, I’m OK, love,’ she’d say.
It broke my heart.
Yet Mum was still a joy to be around, dropping her false teeth in unsuspecting people’s hands as a joke.
Eventually, to escape domestic violence, she moved away, but Mum still struggled. Stopped eating and brushing her hair.
I visited her, worried sick. But Mum was thrilled in December 2020, when my partner Scott, then 27, and I had a daughter, Lexi.
‘She’s so beautiful,’ Mum said, holding her, smitten.
COVID-19 restrictions meant she missed time with Lexi.
But becoming a nana triggered something, and over the following year she got help from the doctors.
‘You look healthy, Mum,’ I said, taking Lexi, then 1, round to see her.
‘Thanks darling,’ Mum beamed back.
Happiness looked beautiful on her.
Everything’s going to be OK now, I thought. But just weeks later in early December 2022, I got a message from my brother Da
