Yet Here I Am

Deborah Binner believed the stage was set for a contented midlife after a rocky childhood. A happy marriage, good job, lovely home and three daughters moving relatively peacefully towards adolescence and beyond. What more could she ask for? Then in 2013 her world came crashing down when an 'innocuous' pain in her 15 year-old daughter's leg turned into a cancer diagnosis. And despite an agonising three-year battle with bone cancer, Chloe died aged just 18 and two weeks. Flung into a tsunami of grief, the small family tried to navigate a path to survival. But fate intervened again. Just 18 months after Chloe's death, Deborah's beloved husband Simon was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. As a man who was adamant that "the endgame of motor neurone disease is not for me", he ended his life in a Swiss suicide clinic within months of diagnosis. Their family's story was the subject of a BAFTA-nominated BBC documentary, How to Die: Simon's Choice. In Yet Here I Am, Deborah looks back at a life ripped apart by so much loss out of the natural order of things. Brutally frank, searingly honest and heartbreakingly poignant, she charts her remarkable journey from suicidal grief to some kind of survival and eventually, to a new form of happiness. This is a book about the resilience of the human spirit, hope in the face of agonising despair and the power of love.