WEDNESDAY,FEBRUARY 21, 2018
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Sylvia Lagah, Wairarapa Helicopters pilot Dave BramwellCooke holding Stuart Wardle’s ashes, Ralph Wardle, Diane D’Ath, and Lesley Wardle. PHOTO/SUPPLIED
Bucket list honoured EMILY IRELAND Stuart Wardle was supposed to take to the skies in a helicopter when he won his cancer battle. But this never happened. The Kuranui College old boy died last June, at the age of 46, several months after his cancer diagnosis. Parents Lesley and Ralph Wardle, of Featherston, remember vividly the day Stu was diagnosed – after all, it was within half an hour of winning a free helicopter ride. “After that, we got a phone call saying
our son Stuart was in hospital, and we were asked to please go to Wellington,” Lesley said. Stuart, who lived in Johnsonville, had been suffering neck pain for some time, and had been seeing doctors “over months and months” with no success in finding the source of his pain. In the end, he took himself to Wellington Hospital and paid for his own MRI scan, because he did not have a referral. Family believe this scan was never reimbursed – it showed he had secondary bowel cancer which had spread to his neck.
It was quickly decided that the free helicopter trip the Wardles had won would be an incentive for Stu to recover – he even added it onto his bucket list which included things like learning to swim, and eating Bluff oysters. Even after his death, the Wardles were determined Stu would take to the skies on that helicopter. And so, last Sunday, the Wardles went up with Wairarapa Helicopters along with Stu’s birth mother Sylvia Lagah, Lesley’s sister Diane D’Ath, and Stu’s ashes. “It started to spit, but it was supposed to
be fining up around the coast,” Lesley said. “So, we went down south, past the clouds and around the coastline [at Riversdale]. “It was absolutely beautiful…the light trying to come through the clouds was just amazing.” Sylvia said the closer they got to the coast, the more the rain teemed down. “If Stu had actually been there, he would have got such a buzz out of it,” she said.
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