“Shocking” is how former boxer Barry McGuigan remembers his daughter’s death aged just 33. In the depths of the Australian jungle this week, on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity, the 63-year-old broke down as he shared the devastation of losing Danika to bowel cancer five years ago. “I used to go to church a lot, but after [she died], not as much,” he told his campmates. “I’ve tried to talk about it,” he said through tears, “no matter what I do, it just all comes back.”
Mark Nuttall, 62, understands McGuigan’s anguish. His daughter, Laura, died from brain cancer last May, aged 23.
“Men and women are different in the way they display their feelings,” Nuttall explains. “I’m the fixer in the family; I mend things,” he says, becoming emotional. “And I couldn’t, there’s nothing I could do, so you feel a bit of a failure in that sense. That is something that haunts me a little.”
Laura was 18, and six weeks into her first term as an international relations student at King’s College, London, when a routine eye test highlighted that something was amiss. Later that day, struggling to stay awake, she went to hospital, and was told there was nothing “especially worrying” about her case. She would be referred to a neurologist, the doctor said, “at some point in the future”.
Laura had been hit by migraines and sickness in the weeks beforehand, and the following day became deeply unwell, vomiting constantly and battling a severe headache. Her mother, Nicola, and younger sister, Gracie, travelled from their home in Barrowford, Lancs, to London, and took her to hospital, where a CT scan appeared to show two tumours on her brain. She was then sent for an MRI, which revealed there were more likely eight tumours.
“I was quite ignorant of all this going on,” says Nuttall, who had remained at home. “I went to bed and got a phone call at three o’clock in the morning, and that’s when I was told that my daughter had a brain tumour,” he recalls. None of them had ever heard of glioblastoma multiforme, prompting an immediate surge of research. “It became clear very quickly that if it was a certain kind of brain tumour, which it turned out to be, there was nothing you could do.”
Laura was given 12-18 months to live, and told to abort her study plans. Instead she moved home, read politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Manchester and became a local and national sensation thanks to her unique bucket list – which included running a marathon, driving a 650-tonne crane, meeting Michelle Obama, going on a safari and skydiving.
She also became an ambassador for the Brain Tumour Charity, pressing for better research into brain tumours, which kill more under-40s than any other kind of cancer, yet receive just two per cent of funding.
Nuttall, a TV storyboard artist, had previously worked with Peter Kay. The comedian was coaxed out of retirement by Laura’s diagnosis and donated tens of thousands of pounds from ticket sales for her to have immunotherapy in Germany. “She was a very determined person: you would never tell Laura she couldn’t do something, because she would go all out to prove you wrong,” Nuttall says.
Laura’s courage, via the posts and videos she shared, amassed a following of tens of thousands on social media, and an outpouring of support in her community. In a video posted five months before her death, she said: “It’s terminal, I should make peace with that” – but the idea was clearly as unbearable as it sounds. “It’s not fair,” she explained candidly, that her friends were making life plans while she was being “constricted by this thing that’s trying to kill me”.
She struggled to stay as upbeat as her father when her world was, conservatively, falling to pieces around her. He had hoped that positivity might just be enough where multiple brain surgeries, radiotherapy and chemo had failed. “My wife would accept the fact that [Laura] was going to die, and I didn’t, and I would build a case as to why,” he remembers.
“Right up until probably four months before she died, she appeared, looked and behaved well, so it was very difficult to believe that this girl who was going on a walk up a mountain with me would be possibly dead in a few months. It was hard to accept,” he admits. He tried to prepare himself for the inevitable, “because all these people can’t be wrong. But you still refuse to believe it.”
All the while, Nuttall was grappling with his own pain, but “didn’t want to collapse in front of my wife because that wouldn’t have done any good at all. Somebody had to steer the ship and I felt that was my duty to do that,” he says now. For Laura especially, a “stoic” who “never cried over spilt milk,” Nuttall “felt I had to remain strong, and I think a lot of fathers feel the same way.”
His close friends provided support (he was particularly struck by one, who said: “‘It’s s**t, Mark. You know where I am.’ And that was enough, actually, for me.”) He continued working and fundraising, which the family continues to do via the Be More Laura Foundation; they are organising a charity ball, and on Boxing Day will serve food to those unable to afford a Christmas meal – a useful distraction then, and now.
Laura died in May 2023, four and a half years on from being diagnosed. Losing her is still “raw,” her father says; her bedroom, next to his office, remains as it was when she was last in it. “It’s very easy when I’m working to just imagine she’s still next door,” he says, tears rising. “I believe Laura’s always with me, I believe she’s always there, and I can still have a conversation with her, still. And that helps. Yeah, that helps a lot.”
