When Isabella Darch sat down at her laptop to write a raw and heartbreakingly honest blog-post about her three-year-old son Bede, she never expected what came next.
Over the coming days, she and husband Roy watched as their little boy dominated headlines, many reading ‘Perth mum wants son to die’.
“My heart is raw,” Isabella revealed within the post. “Because the truth is I want my son to die. I’m tired. He is tired. I want peace for him, rest.”
A broken Isabella and Roy have known their precious son is desperately sick with terminal brain cancer since he was just six weeks old.
Speaking to Carrie Bickmore - who lost her husband to brain cancer in 2010 - the exhausted mother explained the horror of seeing her child slowly deteriorate on Monday night's episode of The Project.
“He just became emaciated,” Isabella said. “Every bone on his body, every ligament, parts of his skull started to look like horns, the skin was hanging off him. And he was growing back into clothes he’d outgrown.”
The doting parents would soon be told by an oncologist Bede's cancer had spread to his spine and brain - a kind so aggressive it was unresponsive to chemotherapy.
“The tools Bede has fought with isn’t necessarily this arsenal of meds but the love that we give him and that he gives us,” Isabella said. “We always say his life is a miracle of medicine and love because they’ve fought hand-in-hand.”
Carrie spent hours with the family, and was brought to tears while watching Bede and his brother play.
"He’s such a joyful little kid," the popular host said. “The hours that I’ve been here and seeing him with his brother — their heads so close together. It’s like their happy space.”
What Isabella and Roy want for their beautiful son is simple: a dignified death.
“We just spoke about how difficult this process had been and brain cancer can often be a horrible, protracted death,” she explained on The Project. “And I wish that I could give my child the death I want for him. Who ever thought they’d say those words?”