'I'm Dying': Mom With Brain Cancer Reveals How She's Preparing Her Children

A young mother-of-two who was recently diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer has shared her heartbreaking story, detailing all the ways in which she's preparing her small children for a life without her.

Just over a year ago, Jennifer Mihill, a physician from Ottawa, Canada, was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a fast-growing and aggressive brain tumor that affects about 3.21 in 100,000 people. While surgery can help remove some of the malignant tissue, this type of tumor is typically surrounded by a zone of migrating tumor cells that invade surrounding tissues, making it impossible to ever remove the tumor entirely.

But while this was a hard diagnosis for Mihill, a married woman in her early 40s, her main concern is for her small children, Scarlett and Cooper, who are just 9 and 7, so she's making the most of her time with them now. She is doing everything possible to make their life easy, both emotionally and financially, making sure that her family will be stable even when she'll no longer be with them.

Mihill told Newsweek that her cancer was found "almost by accident," after she was admitted to hospital in February 2022 with COVID, suffering from what she initially thought were just symptoms of the virus.

"I was feeling unwell but I just thought it was due to COVID. I had been having some symptoms, but I just didn't recognize that they were from a brain tumor. I had some headaches, and a little bit of nausea, and I also had some bizarre behaviors. I started just doing funny things that were a little bit out of character for me. When I was admitted to hospital, I just continued to be unwell, and then I became kind of confused and a little bit disoriented," she said.

After a week in hospital, an MRI confirmed the shocking diagnosis that nobody was expecting. Shortly afterwards, she traveled to Toronto, where a neurosurgeon began her treatment.

"There are many different treatments that doctors can try, like surgery, radiation, or immunotherapy, but there isn't a true treatment that's curative for this cancer, so they just basically try and hold it until it starts to come back then they try something else, and so you just try to keep it at bay for as long as you can, and usually life expectancy is around three years."

How I Told My Kids I Have Terminal Cancer

"Telling my children that I'm dying was the hardest thing I had to do," Mihill said, "I truly toiled over it for a couple of months, and then I realized that I didn't have the tools to do so."

That's when Mihill reached out to a child psychologist, who works specifically with children whose parents have cancer, asking her what is the best way to tell a child that their parent is terminally ill, in the kindest possible way.

"She was very honest with me and she told me that I needed to promise my kids that I would not keep things from them because otherwise, they would fear everything all the time. That I will tell them when my cancer comes back, and while I will not go into details, I will let them know everything that's important," she added.

The psychologist explained to her that kids have big emotions too, and many of the same fears as we have, just expressed in a different way, and that the best way to approach this situation is by being age-appropriately honest.

"I think that my children have been extraordinarily brave and also that they're very positive about the situation. Honestly, once you tell your family, it's so liberating because they don't attach any meaning to it. They accept what I tell them at face value, so when I say it's gonna be okay, and we're gonna get through it, no matter what the outcome is, they trust me," Mihill said.

"When I initially told them, my son was very young, he had literally just turned six years old, so his understanding was more limited compared to my daughter's. She was quite mature already and very smart, and she actually told me that she was quite relieved because what she had pictured in her mind was way worse than what I had told her."

According to Mihill even though you think that telling your children you have terminal cancer is the worst possible thing you can tell them, children's brains wander beyond our imagination, and sometimes what's in their head is way scarier than reality could ever be.

Now that it's in the open and her children know exactly her situation, they are "relaxed about it" and accept it, and even the sleeping problems they were having when the thoughts in their heads got the best of them, are gone. With time they have learned to speak about it openly in their day-to-day, and sometimes even make jokes about it too.

How I'm Preparing My Kids for a Life Without a Mom

Mihill believes that having honest conversations has helped her children to prepare for a life without her. She said: "They aren't afraid of all of this anymore. What they are afraid of is when you lie to them or keep things from them, which I did do at the start and my children actually told me 'it made us afraid when you would speak behind closed doors with daddy and we didn't know what you were talking about. We were afraid something bad was happening or something imminent.'"

Mihill also talks honestly to her children about their future and all the wishes she has for them, trying to make sure they don't close up to the idea of love.

"I truly want them to be happy. I want them to love and be loved by anybody that's important to them. So, if daddy gets a new wife or a girlfriend and they love her, and she loves them, that is okay. That's important. I have a blended family myself, and I told them look at me! I have two sets of grandparents, and I have several types of parents, and I love them all for different reasons and they offer different things in my life and they've been a guiding force in my life in so many ways. And it's okay to love many different grownups and parents in many different ways. And that would never upset me. It's what I want for them.

"We talk about being positive and seeing the silver lining in life. So when my kids come to me with their problems or their fears, just in everyday life, we just acknowledge that and we sit with those feelings until we find the silver lining. We find the joy and the dark time too because I think that's what life is truly all about, because every single aspect of life is going to be both positive and negative. Even our very best days come with their negatives."

'I don't want them to ever remember me with sadness'

The young mom also managed to find the silver lining in her own tragedy, for the sake of her children's happiness and wellbeing.

"I always point out to my kids that I'm home with them now, and we have fun every day, we laugh, we make jokes, we go for picnics. We never had this, I used to work all the time, and cancer sort of gave this to us. That's something that we wouldn't have had otherwise, so there is always a bright side to every dark thing and I think like when you help them see that in every situation, it just sets them up with a sort of template of how they're going to view their life.

"I don't want them to ever remember me with sadness. They will be sad, I know that, but I want them to remember me with happiness, and I tell them that all the time. I told my kids when you see a butterfly flying around, that's mommy and she's just come in to check on you and make sure you're happy. I want to see them laughing and smiling. It's okay to cry, but life is a joy and I want them to just be happy."

How I'm Financially Preparing My Family For My Death

But emotional preparation isn't Mihill's only goal, in fact, she's going the extra mile by making sure that on a financial and bureaucratic level, her family is set, and they will not have to worry about these aspects of their life after her departure.

"I've eliminated any personal accounts that I have, all of our accounts are joint accounts. I made sure all of the bills are in both of our names. I set up a bank account just recently for my young children, obviously, my husband and I are the owners of those accounts that are in my children's names so we can transfer money to them just before I die so that they don't end up with any tax implications.

Among other ways she's setting them up for the future, Mihill put her children's education fund into a trust for them and diverted all her life insurance policies to her husband and some directly to her children.

"I made sure that they have access to those funds over time and appropriately, I want them to understand the importance of saving money, and so on. I've ordered all our important documents so I ordered notarized copies of our marriage certificates, and the kids' passports because in Canada it's much easier when both parents sign the forms. I did my husband as well so that he would have that.

"I also transferred my vehicle to my husband, so that there's no issue if he wants to sell one of the vehicles that we have. It's just one less thing for him to do because otherwise he would have to go and do that with the will and certificate and so trying to eliminate all these things that he would have to do as the executor of my will."

'I want my children to be really happy, I want them to laugh and move forward'

When Mihill was first diagnosed with glioblastoma it certainly wasn't easy to accept, but as shocked and overwhelmed as she was, she didn't even have time to process her feelings before it was time for her treatment to start, and as a result, she just felt confused for about a month.

When she started regaining control of her emotions, she said she was in a very bad place, until she realized that she had to be brave for her children and give them all the happy memories she always wanted to make with them.

"I really thought long about it and thought, you know what, this will be the last experience that my children will have with me, and I'm their mother! As a human, I have one of the greatest impacts upon their lives. So I took this opportunity to do something good for my family and do something good for myself and take something good away from this because I can't change it. And I can't go back in time and not get cancer. So I had to find a way to make this the best situation that it could be.

"I just also spent a lot of time truly meditating and reflecting and trying to think how I could live my best life. It's in the bottom of my heart that I want my children to be really happy and I want them to laugh and move forward, so I'm trying to instill a bit of resilience in them because they're young, and they can move forward with true happiness."

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