“When Vicky was ill, she was more concerned with our feelings than she was with herself,” Ben Halstead says, smiling as he talks about his sister.
“In the hospice, when the doctor came and spoke to us and said, have you got any questions? She said, ‘just one – what support is available for my family?'”
For Ben this memory “really sums up the type of person” Victoria Schofield was.
Vicky, or Vic to some, was a speech and language therapist living in Apperley Bridge in Bradford, working between Nottingham Hospitals and her private practice.
However, in 2025, aged just 32, she died shortly after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer – but her only thought until the end was about how to help others, Ben says.
To carry on her legacy, friends and family are setting up a foundation to support those with terminal illnesses and their loved ones, as well as people who work in palliative care.
“It was actually Vic’s idea,” her husband Jack Schofield explains.
“While there’s probably hundreds of people inspired to help others on behalf of Vic, the charity itself was actually directly from her in those last few weeks.”
Vic was cared by staff at St Gemma’s Hospice, in Leeds, and was able to spend quality time with her many visitors, often in the garden as she loved the outdoors.
“I think we look back [and] even though they were some of the toughest times of our life, they were some of the most special,” Ben says.
Her family helped cover the couple’s mortgage payments, so that Jack could take time off from his sports photography business to be by his wife’s side.