World Rose Day is celebrated on 22nd Sept every year in the memory of a brave Canadian teen girl who died fighting cancer.
Enter Melinda Rose, 12, an aspiring dancer who was diagnosed with a rare kind of blood cancer in Feb. 1994
Doctors assumed she'd die in a week or two at the most.
The shock would have pushed anyone into depression. But Rose's brain was a bit differently wired.
Soon she was counselling other kids who were diagnosed with the dreaded disease.
She'd talk about being positive and being happy. She would train the diagnosed kids to keep the hope of life burning.
Wherever she went, her advent brought freshness akin to her name. Cancer was torturing her body but her mind was unconquerable.
She started a website and shared poetry and her best wishes for the cancer patients across the globe.
Melinda breathed her last in September 1996. She came to be regarded as an angel of love and sympathy for one another across the world.
Novelist Lurneal McDaniel wrote a book on the life of Melinda Rose., named, "A Rose for Melinda" . It's a touching tale of the girl who lived a short but memorable life.
An excerpt: Dear Mom and Dad, I'm writing this the night before I go into the chamber. I gave it to Bailey to put with my special box in my closet because I know that you'll find it someday. ...
May be next week, or even years from now when I've moved away and you've decided to clean out my room but whenever you find it , I want you to know how much you both mean to me.
Further writes McDaniel, " Nobody gets to pick their time to die but living everyday to the max is something we all get to do. "