Deborah James has revealed her wish for her younger self and how she inspired her students - as shared in her posthumous book published on Thursday following her death earlier this summer. Dame Deborah, also known by her social media handle Bowel Babe, died on June 28 at the age of 40 after suffering from bowel cancer for five years.
In How to Live When You Could Be Dead, which follows her 2018 debut book F*** You Cancer: How To Face The Big C, Live Your Life And Still Be Yourself, the podcast host tells her courageous story of living with terminal cancer and how developing a positive mindset was key to enabling her to cope with her diagnosis.
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In chapter three - titled 'Something to aim for' - the mum-of-two looks back at her teenage years, and says that at 16, all she had hoped for was to marry and have children. On reflection, she admits she should have been more ambitious. "Looking back at my naive younger self, I wish I’d been a bit more ambitious with my hopes and dreams," Deborah wrote.
"I wish I’d considered some goals that would have pushed me or been a challenge to reach. I wish I’d considered – even for a nanosecond – that things could be taken away from me, that the future isn’t certain for any of us."
The former deputy headteacher goes on to talk about how she discovered her goal to be an educator in her twenties - which she labels as ironic after not taking school too seriously.
She added: "The opportunity to shape the lives of my students, some of whom were still trying to find their way in life, as I was at their age, was a real privilege and something I threw myself into.
"I wanted to change the world, one pupil at a time. I wanted to prove to young people that they could reach for the stars."
Earlier in the book, Deborah urges readers to value their time, which is something she also encouraged among her pupils.
She ran workshops with her sixth-formers and during these, would read an extract from a piece by French writer Marc Levy, which pulled on her heartstrings when she first read it as a teen, she says.
"It asks the reader to imagine that they have a bank account that is credited with $86,400 every day, but every evening anything that isn’t used is lost, only to be topped up again with the same amount the next morning," she explained.
"If you had such an account, you’d spend every dollar, wouldn’t you? Levy goes on to explain that we do have such a bank account, but that every morning we receive 86,400 seconds, and the time that we don’t use is lost for ever:
"'If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no going back. There is no drawing against the ‘tomorrow’.
"The point the piece is making is that we must make the most of the time we have every day because we can’t get back those seconds, minutes or hours once they are gone."
Deborah said she then asked her students to write down in a notebook what they were going to do with their time and how they could use it effectively.
She admitted: "I know I waste time, going down rabbit holes on social media, for example. I think we all do.
"So I wanted the students to recognise this and realise that valuing time and using it constructively is a challenge and something we have to actively consider.
"We all know that time is precious.
"We all know, rationally speaking, that it will eventually be taken from us, and yet we somehow don’t really think it’s ever going to end – many of us don’t truly get past our teenage perception of infinite time.
"We think that we can put things off to another day or that we can buy more time. But sometimes there is no tomorrow."
The book release follows Deborah's mum, Heather, being interviewed this week - where she revealed the campaigner told her that she didn't want to die.
Recalling the conversation in an interview with BBC Breakfast, Deborah's mum said: "I can remember lying in bed, probably just about a week or so before she died.
"And she was quite poorly that night and she went, 'I do love you' and I went, 'Yeah I love you'. And she said: 'I have no regrets, you know?'
"And I went: 'that's brilliant' – how many people can say that? But, she did say 'I don't want to die' and that's the hardest, saddest part."
During her hospice care at home, Deborah continued to raise awareness for bowel cancer and also began her Bowel Babe fund during her end-of-life care, which has since raised more than £7.4 million for cancer charities.
How to Live When You Could Be Dead is available to purchase now in most bookstores and online. You can buy it here.
