I was ten years old and hated school. I had a ridiculous bob haircut, was getting bullied every day and my mother had been terminally ill for three years.

Every evening we visited her in hospital to find her pale, bald and with an IV line in her wrist supplying her with a variety of pain killers. She listened to my brother, sister and I talking about our day at school, how music lessons were going and how odd we thought our current nanny was. She was attentive but spent a lot of time sleeping as she was on a high dose of chemotherapy not normally recommended as a last resort so was constantly tired and nauseous and as my father had been so worried about her, we had taken a month long family holiday in case she didn’t make it through: his reasoning being that we had to make the most of any time we had left with her. Surprisingly the doctors had agreed with this idea and so we had a lavish trip to Australia.

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas and she wasn’t getting any better. I must have been an extremely obtuse ten year old because I never thought that she might die, just that she had been ill for a very long time and that her doctor always looked rather worried when he talked to my dad about her. We had been getting ready to go and visit her when, stupidly, I asked my father when she was coming home. He looked taken aback,
‘Sweetheart, she may never come home. We don’t know whether she will make it past Christmas but you have to be a good older sister and protect the others. You have to be strong.’

I didn’t know what to say, it felt as though my very insides had dropped out and I was falling down a precipice with no end. I had very few friends at school, my family was everything. She couldn’t die, she just couldn’t.
I kept very quiet in the car on the way there, merely listened to nostalgic Paul Simon songs and giving brief answers to my fathers’ questions about my piano lesson that day. We arrived at the hospital and my mother was even weaker than usual so my siblings and I gargled Christmas carols to cheer her up. She perked up immediately especially at our version of ‘The Holly and The Ivy’ and when we left that evening my father thanked me for organising it. I felt as though I was in on a secret that I didn’t want to be in on but if I had to be then I had a responsibility to help him out and I was glad that I could do that.

School ended for the year and Christmas week arrived. Suddenly, impossibly, Mum took a turn for the worse and we ended up visiting her twice a day. My father was told that she might not be back even for half a day for Christmas and that we should start preparing for the worst. It got to Christmas Eve and as I had taken to praying to prevent bad dreams (surprisingly effective at the time), I asked for my mother to get better and for her to come home.

We all woke up on Christmas morning and after opening stockings and putting the goose on (we were at a stage of more exotic Christmas dinners) we got a call from the hospital:

‘Hello Mr Dilke, your wife woke up this morning feeling quite well. The doctors have decided that she can come back for the day, would you like to pick her up at eleven?’

We dashed to the hospital and collected her. The goose burnt, my mother was exhausted, my father flustered and instead of our usual traditions my brother, sister and I watched cartoons and gnawed on desiccated goose leg. It was the best Christmas I ever had. And knowing that she was upstairs was such a good Christmas present.

We took her back to hospital the next day and the surprising thing was that she started to get better. Three months later she went into remission and the high dose chemotherapy stopped. Her hair started to grow back curly and she was home with us six months after Christmas for good.
I got into a good secondary school, passed my grade five piano exam and had a mother again. It made me believe in God because what were the odds of a high risk treatment bringing my mother basically back from the dead? It seemed so unlikely.

We got five years with her and she then relapsed and died. People always tell me how sorry they are and I miss her every day but, if she had died that Christmas I would have missed those five years which were the best I ever had with her. Every extra day was a gift which we made the most of: we took more family holidays, more pictures and had some very good memories. She left her job, made sure that my brother was happy at school and watched us grow up a bit more. If she had gone that Christmas I would have been ten, my sister: eight and my brother five: we would have hardly known her.
Even as a scientist I will always believe that Christmas day to be a miracle.