Thank you for taking the time to visit our JustGiving page.

On 28 April 2023 we lost our wonderful, kind and brilliant son and brother, Aaron, to bowel cancer. He was a much-loved history lecturer, researcher and author at University College London. He was only 38.

His cancer was highly aggressive and fast-moving. He was only in hospital for a week before he died, spending his last few days in the Critical Care Unit (CCU) where the wonderful doctors and nurses battled so hard to save him.

During that time we, together with Josh's wife Emma spent as much time as we could at the hospital, using the facilities of the nearby Macmillan Cancer Centre when we needed privacy and respite from the awful ordeal we faced every day of that week. But the Centre closed in the early evening – as did the hospital café, albeit a little later - and in the last few days we didn’t want to leave the hospital at all, leaving no option but to sit in the small, cramped CCU Family Room with little privacy and barely any facilities to make a cup of coffee or bring in a meal. Conferences with doctors, which were emotional and, at the end, heartbreaking were often held in this room or even in corridors or store rooms, such was the lack of space.

Sadly, the main Family Room on the CCU floor was closed to visitors during the pandemic as it was larger and therefore needed to provide an additional, socially-distanced, rest area for staff. There are now plans to re-open it again for families such as ours, who need somewhere to go when not sitting with their loved ones or when they need space to grieve for precious hours after losing them. At the moment the room is rather unwelcoming; there is little privacy and the furniture is old and tired and all needs replacing. We would also like to install a couple of extendable easy chairs that could be used for family members who need to stay the night whilst waiting for their loved ones to come through surgery or treatment, or perhaps because their demise is imminent and they cannot bear to leave the hospital in case they return too late to be with them when they pass away.

We originally committed to raising £10,000 to help with this refurbishment. If there was any surplus we intended to use it to upgrade the smaller room that we used during our visits, as it is also in need of some TLC and better facilities, so that it could be used as a fully private area for family conferences with doctors and the medical team.

Thanks to the overwhelming generosity of our family, friends and colleagues, we exceeded our original target. We therefore increased the target to £20,000. This too was exceeded which should hopefully ensure that we have sufficient funds to be able to refurbish both the Family Room and the smaller room that we used whilst Aaron was in the CCU. We have therefore now progressively increased the target further to £37,500 and we will discuss with the CCU team how any additional funds raised can be applied for the benefit of families who find themselves in our position.

Please help us to reach our goal as quickly as possible so that other families can find respite at some of the most difficult and worrying times of their lives. We never thought it might be us.

Thank you again for your support.

Sharon, Robert and Josh Graham