After battling leukemia for several years, 18-year-old Laura Hillier passed away last January.
She had been waiting a long time to get a stem cell transplant and had several donors become available in July of 2015. However, due to a lack of hospital beds, she couldn’t get the procedure done until August of that year.
The leukemia came back aggressively in November, and she was placed in the ICU before being brought home just a few weeks before she died.
Because of her condition and very weak immune system, many of her friends weren’t able to say good bye to Laura in her last days.
She was also just a few months shy of graduating from high school, but she never made it to that special mile marker with her peers.
So her classmates decided to do something amazing to commemorate the beautiful life she lived that was cut much too short. They turned Laura’s entire coffin into a life-sized high school yearbook and wrote hundreds of endearing messages to their beloved friend.
A classmate posted a picture of the decorated coffin to Imgur in order to raise awareness about the long wait times for patients, which often results in tragedy for those in desperate need.
The motto for Laura’s battle was also written on the side of her coffin: ‘Life is a song. Sing it til your heart’s content.’
And she surely did.
Though death is often represented by darkness, I just love how Laura was laid in the ground in vibrant colors, representative of the beautiful way she lived. ❤️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_ikOXa5uB0
