Simeon Caleb Davis

On 31 May 2024 our Simeon and I presented to the North Canberra Hospital for help with what we thought were complications from Glandular Fever. After 17 years of obnoxiously robust glowing health and fitness, our SIm had been unwell for a couple of week. Really unwell. A single blood test later and we were flying through the night to the Sydney Children's Hospital for Simeon to begin treatment for leukemia. We arrived carrying only our drink bottles and mobile phones. Sim and I lived in or close to Sydney Children's until the end of February 2025 when Sim was able to move home. He had missed the finishing off of his school life - those rituals like formals and graduations and conversations about what next that help bring closure to life as a school kid. He celebrated his 18th Birthday alone with me in tears in an isolation ward after an attempt to spend the day with his family was tripped up by coronavirus rearing its ugly head. As a family we missed so many things, important, special things, that it's too hard to begin to list them. I resigned from the workplace and work people that had fed, clothed and housed our family for 19 years. Our other kids woke up every day without their mum. Tony ploughed on to work every day as an army of helpers drove our children to and from school. Our family was apart for the first time. But Sim was alive and that made it all unspeakably worth it.

From the outset Sim's battle was uphill and challenging. Sim was diagnosed with undifferentiated leukemia - a cancer that formed in the very genesis of his cells. Our incredible oncologist sat us down and told us there is no treatment protocol for Sim, chemotherapy would not be effective to eradicate it and may not even work to ready him for a stem cell transplant. From the beginning we were in a desperate race to prepare Sim for a bone marrow transplant - his only chance of survival. Sim's preparation was the most brutal process I have ever watched play out in slow motion from the fold-out bed by his side. Pain. Surgeries. Overwhelming nausea. Pain. So much pain. Total Body Irradiation. Throughout all of that process Sim's gentle, quiet resolve and brilliant, problem solving brain won him so much respect. And love. His nurses. The cleaners. The doctors. Even the porters. They saw our Sim. His gratitude. His humility. HIs close interest in all of them. His discipline. Finding him awake at 3am with pain so acute not even the cocktail of endone, fentanyl and ketamine could take the edge off it, calmy doing Tai Chi to manage his body while the pain specialists conferred away.

On 31 October 2024 Sim received the stem cells that had been harvested from his beloved older brother, Isaac. Two boys. Forever linked in body and heart. The same cells coursing through their bodies. Our only shot at a long-term. But those transplanted cells came out swinging. They woke up in a body they didn't recognise and the havoc started to build. Graft vs Host Disease. It started slowly. It gave Sim time to be alive and to know a life he had been longing for for such a long time. The ocean. The outside. Long walks. Friends. His siblings. His cousins. His family. So many of the people he loved so dearly and had missed so much. Sim filled his days with the people he loved as the Graft vs Host Disease slowly gained on him. We are so incredibly grateful that throughout this last part of his fight our Sim was shockingly well. Strong, fit, present. I sat alongside him for each of his weekly outpatient appointments with his wonderful medical team. As he described what he'd been up to and how he was feeling, the wry, almost disbelieving smiles. How could he be so well? And he was well. Two weeks before he was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at Canberra Hospital he spent a glorious weekend in and around the ocean with family friends he had grown up with. It was only days after returning he tested positive to influenza B. Within hours influenza B combined forces with Graft vs Host disease and Sim's strong, capable, agile body began to falter. It took his liver, then his lungs, and finally his heart.

Sim died with his Mum and Dad holding him close on the morning of Sunday 18th May. His beloved siblings had driven through the night to see him and were able to hold him in the early hours of Sunday morning as his heart failed. He died in the intensive care unit of the RPA in Sydney, having been flown there on life support from Canberra the week before. During that week he had had startling moments of alertness and it was unspeakably precious to have had that time to hold him and speak to him.

Tony, Isaac, Jemima, Hannah, Joel and I drove home last Monday to stare down a life together without our Sim. Our brilliant, stern, funny, devoted, caring, animated Sim. A life force that shaped our family life in so very many ways. We are more grateful than words can express that we share Sim's confidence that death was a release for our boy - a release from pain, sickness, disappointment, grief and frustration to wholeness and joy in the company of the God who made him, delights in him and has had a place prepared for his homecoming. Home.

But we who are left behind and loved Sim together need a chance to grieve, remember, celebrate and rebuild.

Thank you for your kindness in helping us create a memorial service for us all to remember together.

And thank you for your kindness in helping us reimagine and recraft our family and our life without him. Your kindness, your shared love of our boy, has been so important. Thank you.