Craig Sinclair died at home in his Brooklyn apartment on 10 March 2025, exactly where he wanted to be, after a costly battle with bladder cancer that forced his wife, Shannon Carroll, to raise more than $65,000 in a panic from friends and family. The 49-year-old British expatriate, who moved from England in his twenties for a PhD in comparative literature, had spent years navigating the US healthcare system — a system he once called “insane” compared to the National Health Service he grew up with. The final cost of giving him the death he deserved left his family grappling not only with grief but with a mountain of debt and unanswered bills.
The hospital ordeal
Before Craig could be brought home, he and Shannon first had to survive a shared room on the top floor of NYU Langone Hospital in Manhattan. It was December 2024, and their fourth emergency hospital stay of the year. By then, they had a packing list: sleeping masks, toothbrushes, ginger chews, ostomy supplies. Craig, once a tall, athletic man who loved dancing at Bushwick clubs until dawn, arrived by cab and hugged the nearest tree on the sidewalk — the last time he would walk outside. In the emergency room, Shannon breathlessly recited his medical history, a script she knew by heart. He was wheeled in immediately. Transferred to the ICU in the middle of the night, he ran into their November ICU nurse, who said: “I always remember the best ones.”
The NYU palliative team delivered sobering news: it was a miracle Craig still had any cognitive function. His hemoglobin was half of what it should be; even crossing the room exhausted him. “Now is the time,” said Sara, the friend who had driven him to all 39 radiation appointments. Craig took out his phone, multiple IV lines running from both arms, and recorded a farewell video. “My friends, I have challenging news,” he began, speaking haltingly. He spoke of reciprocal love, dancing, and silver linings. “I love you all. Goodbye.” He added a theatrical flourish: “and scene.” They laughed. Just before midnight, he uploaded the video to Instagram and Facebook with the caption “And then things got serious 🙏.” His mother later told Shannon: “He looked terrible.”
The palliative team told them Craig had “days, if not hours.” When the hospital moved him to a shared room on the top floor at 3am, he started crying. They told the staff they wanted to leave. The floor doctor would only sign off on home discharge if hospice and private nursing were in place. Shannon had been warned by a local pharmacist: “No matter what you do, don’t let Craig go to a hospice facility in the city. I used to work at one when I was a resident. No one’s paid well enough to care.” She vowed he would never go to a facility. The private nursing service cost $5,000 to $7,000 per week for a registered nurse five to seven hours a day. Home hospice covered only one nurse visit per week. Craig needed complicated daily wound support only the private nursing service could provide.
That day at the hospital, representatives from the hospice non-profit and the for-profit private nursing company were on the floor. For hours, Shannon paced between Craig’s bed and the hallway, two phones in hand, on hold with one, talking with another. Finally, the team gathered at the foot of the bed. Shannon promised she would be home around the clock and would find a way to fund the private nurse care. The doctor said yes. He could go home. It was also Shannon’s birthday. The social worker brought a handwritten card: “Happy birthday from your family on floor 17” — and a slice of chocolate cake. Craig and Shannon took turns taking bites.
Home hospice: a costly decision
Almost immediately after the hospital bed was delivered to their 750-square-foot Brooklyn apartment, Craig turned on the gentle synth beats of the electronic duo Tommy Awards and dimmed the lights. He went from barely whispering in the hospital to having hearty conversations. He was happy. Seeing how revived he was, Sara and Shannon sat down and said: “It’s GoFundMe time.” But in the lounge, Craig was quiet and distraught. “I wish I had more time,” he said from his hospital bed. “But we don’t have the money. I can just die now.” Shannon stroked his hair: “We’re going to take care of you.”
The crowdfunding campaign was a desperate necessity. In late 2023, three days before Craig started chemotherapy, his employer laid him off without warning. Continuing the life insurance policy that Shannon would have received would have cost $800 a month. At that point, they didn’t know he was dying. Craig declined. As his symptoms worsened, Shannon cut down on freelance work. Once home hospice started, she couldn’t work at all. A 2025 study of more than 78,000 cancer-related GoFundMe campaigns found that fundraisers raised only a third of what they requested, and only 11.5% hit their target. Craig shared the fundraiser with the caption: “I foolishly got sick before I got rich.” They first raised $45,000, then nearly $65,000 — enough to cover private nurses and medical supplies, but barely.
Those “days, if not hours” turned into nearly three months of home hospice. Each night, Shannon slept on the couch beside Craig’s hospital bed. Every morning, before the private nurse arrived, she sprang up to move her belongings. She barely left the apartment or looked in a mirror, forgetting what she looked like. She took turns with the nurses administering liquid morphine with a syringe between his gums and cheek, marking down the amount in a journal. Every few days, she watched the nurse apply increasing dosages of fentanyl patches on his arms. They changed his wound dressings and bags daily. In the office, a few yards from where Craig rested, Shannon hunted online for the cheapest way to order the $300 five-packs of fistula and wound pouches he needed. A few weeks in, she learned the hospice organization could order some supplies, but still not everything.
For the final two months, Craig could not leave his bed. He became too weak to lift a glass to his mouth; Shannon bought him a sippy cup. The day before he died, a hospice nurse had a doctor on a video call to assess him. The nurse went up and down his body, opened his shirt, and solemnly described what she saw — an emaciated, shrunken chest. The doctor needed Craig to say hello. “Say hi Dr Nambidi,” the nurse said. Craig repeated it. Even barely conscious, he made everyone laugh. After the call, he opened his phone to check the Guardian, his favourite news outlet and connection to home. His arms wobbled; he couldn’t hold it steady. Shannon had built him a stabiliser from a cardboard envelope base. “Look at what a genius Shannon is,” he told the nurse. That was the last time he checked the Guardian.
During a chemotherapy session the previous summer, Craig had discussed an interest in medical aid in dying with his oncologist. The oncologist said he had supported another patient who travelled to New Jersey. But New Jersey’s residency requirements at the time ruled it out for Craig, and a five-hour drive to Vermont — which had removed its residency requirement in May 2023 — would have decimated him. After months of delays, New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act was signed into law on 6 February 2026, and will take effect on 5 August 2026. Craig would have qualified. He died two months too early.
Financial and emotional aftermath
The $65,000 raised barely covered the private nursing and supplies. A contested surprise $5,934 bill from another hospital visit arrived repeatedly in the mail, and a notice for a missed payment for a $197.40 blood test from the year before. Shannon stacked them in a corner. “Craig was gone, but the bills still came,” she later wrote. Two months after his death, she learned that New York’s medical aid in dying law had passed. She moved out of their shared apartment in early January of this year, after months of paying rent alone. In the empty office, she gathered one of the final items left behind: the black stair assist cane she had bought for $85 so Craig could re-enter their apartment independently during his final weeks. She kept it as a reminder of what she had learned she was capable of.
The emotional toll was compounded by a cruel gap in New York’s Medicaid system. Shannon discovered that as a spouse, she could not be paid for caregiving through the state’s consumer-directed care program. Adult children, parents, siblings, friends and neighbours could qualify — but spouses are explicitly excluded by law. Every hour she spent helping Craig, managing doctors’ appointments and medications, away from her own work, went uncompensated. In some other states, spouses can be compensated. In New York, she could not. The private nursing, the supplies, the lost income — all of it added up to a debt that outlasted Craig’s life.