Openness made child’s final weeks special

Scott and Llana McNie believe talking openly and honestly about death was key to how they dealt with losing their young daughter.

Three-year-old Sienna died from a type of brain cancer in April, just three months after the family from Falkirk was told the disease was terminal. The McNies wanted their daughter to spend as much time as possible at home with her family before she died.

But they said the reluctance of medical staff to talk about Sienna’s death meant they almost did not get the chance to bring her home.

Mr McNie said: “We found the doctors didn’t want to talk about palliative care options for Sienna. No-one asked us where we wanted her to die.

“If we hadn’t been so willing to talk about Sienna’s death she would have spent her final weeks in a hospice rather than with her family, and that would not have been right for us.”

Mr McNie said they had to accept that their daughter was going to die and make the most of the time they had left. They also planned her funeral.

“We wanted to give her the best funeral we could arrange, complete with a pink coffin in a pink carriage pulled by white horses and 100 pink balloons,” he said.

“To organise that took planning and we wanted to do it when we were still in the right frame of mind to do it.”

The couple said those last weeks they spent with Sienna, especially when she was still well enough to laugh and have fun, were unforgettable.

“Death is a fact of life and when it’s a child it is very, very sad, but not talking about it can only make the situation worse,” Mr McNie said.