Hi there,

Our names are Sandra and Andres and we lost our amazing father Julian Kelly to sarcoma cancer on 03/11/2020 at the age of 62. 

Before diving into the meaning behind this page, we wanted to give some background about our father and how wonderful he is/was. Our father was without doubt, the greatest man we know and will probably ever know. He was born in Andover and moved to Spain at a young age with his family. He went on to study law and became a very successful conveyancing lawyer who helped a lot of people. Our father was the type of man you could approach with any type of problem (be it personal, career related or any silly little thing) and he would sit and listen to you and give you golden advice. He was a family man who loved to joke around and not take things so seriously. Another trait of his was to treat my mum like she was a princess every day of his life since they met 39 years ago. He would drive down early in the morning to put gas in my mum's car if he knew she had to go somewhere that day. He would get up earlier than anyone else and clean the whole kitchen, so it was clean and sparkly when everyone woke up. He would chop up all the vegetables every time they would cook together so my mum wouldn't have to. He would do anything for us and our family.

Our father was diagnosed with stage 4 (metastasis) pleomorphic sarcoma in the leg on 10/03/2020. We still remember getting the phone call from him at work and the panic and horror we felt inside. What we didn't know at the time, was that his diagnosis was stage 4 nor his prognosis because like we said above, he always tried to protect us (especially my mum). The time after his diagnosis was absolutely terrible due to the cancer progressing very fast to the point that he couldn't walk anymore. We won't go into the awful details of the effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy because they are just too awful to bear. What we will say is that our terrific mum took care of my dad for 8 months (whilst we could only get to Spain by car for the remaining 4 months in May due to covid-19 and lockdown). Our father was in and out of hospital for months and tried to work as much as he could to make sure my mum was going to be OK. To this day, we think of the words that he consistently said to us whilst going through all this: "I have been so lucky to have the life that I have had and I have nothing to complain about".

We wanted to set this page up because we are all completely heartbroken and shocked over what has happened to our father which we could have never predicted and was pretty much out of the blue. We want to raise awareness of this horrible and rare disease that is sarcoma cancer. The causes of this cancer are still very much unknown. The money raised will be used for research to ultimately save future lives, so families do not have to suffer like this. It will lead to (someday) finding a cure for sarcoma cancer, and hopefully one day there will be a cure for all cancers.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. If you are able to chip in even with the smallest amount, we would be extremely grateful. If you are not able to chip in, thank you for taking the time to read this, we really appreciate it!

Lots of love

Sandra & Andres

xxxxxx

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