38-year-old mother announces death via Instagram – ‘I knew how deeply I was loved’

A mother from Brooklyn announced the death on Tuesday in a heartbreaking social media post. She wrote it to let her friends and family know that she knew how “deeply” they loved her. Casey McIntyre, 38, died Sunday from cancer ovarian.

She was an editor at Razorbill, which publishes books for children and young adults. “A note to my friends: if you’re reading this, it means I’m dead”she began in her Instagram post.

“I’m so sorry, it’s awful”… The tragic message accompanied a series of photos, which show McIntyre smiling while surrounded by loved ones, particularly her husband, Andrew Gregory, and their 18-month-old daughter, Grace. “I loved each and every one of you with all my heart and, honestly, I knew how deeply I was loved,” she insisted, adding that the last five months she spent at home with her family and friends had been magical.

Her husband said the post was unfortunately discontinued due to her declining health. “Casey intended to end her post with a list of things that have been a comfort and joy to her during her lifetime and I’m in pieces, that I will never see this list,” she wrote.

In fact, he imagined that his wife of eight years in her completed post would include their “daughter Grace, whales, ice cream, her beloved friends, the beach, her adoring niece and nephews, reading 10 books in week’s vacation, her lovely parents and sister and their amazing extended family, swimming, a perfect roast beef sandwich and me, her sweet honey.’

Andrew Gregory asked McIntyre’s friends to comment on a comfort or joy they shared with her. The post quickly went viral with thousands of likes and hundreds of emotional comments. “Oh Casey!!!! I don’t know how we’ll make it without you, but we will,” Gregory said.

On Wednesday, he updated his wife’s Instagram page with screenshots of a … quasi-obituary, shared from his own account, in which he described McIntyre as a beloved family man and an “amazing New Yorker.”

“She took great joy in publishing books for a new generation of readers and saw herself in every child lying on a sofa, carpet or bunk, immersed in their latest obsession with books,” her obituary read. Born on February 1, 1985, McIntyre grew up in Upper Manhattan and Tenafly, New Jersey, before attending Agnes Scott College in Georgia. She and Gregory married in 2015. She was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer in 2019 while undergoing IVF treatment.

“I had a major surgery in January [2020], where they removed everything that had cancer – a full hysterectomy, part of my spleen, part of my liver, part of my lung. That was the scary part,” she told Cup of Jo in July 2020. “These days, I’m feeling more optimistic. Doing IVF alongside cancer treatment made me realize that women go through a lot of difficult things and don’t talk about them as much.”

The couple welcomed their daughter Grace in April 2022.

Her family fondly recalled that McIntyre “always knew how to recommend the best magazines, the best restaurants to spot celebrities on her lunch break (!) and gave every New Yorker the advice: make sure you buy a coat that covers your butt , because there you lose a lot of warmth”. However, “her greatest gifts and joys were her wit, her easy laugh, her devotion to her family and friends, and her amazing determination.” She received treatment from a “top-notch” New York medical team and was especially grateful for her “nurses,” who rightly or wrongly told her she could check in and then wait for chemotherapy to start while eating a shrimp cocktail at PJ Clarke’s.’

Those who wish can make an anonymous donation in her memory for medical equipment through the RIP Medical Debt charity.

More than $44,000 has been raised as of Wednesday afternoon.