Nine-year-old boy with cancer lived on to meet his newborn sister before dying

Bristol, Jan 18: He was just nine but at that age, Bailey Cooper showed tremendous resilience despite having one of the world's most deadly ailments: cancer. The boy, eldest of three siblings, relapsed from cancer for the second time in 2017 when he came to learn that his mother Rachel was pregnant and due to deliver a sister. Bailey, despite his failing health, hung on to see his sister and he eventually did, before passing away on Christmas Eve in 2017, PEOPLE reported.

"All he was concerned about was meeting his little sister. Bailey knew something wasn't right. He could feel it in himself," Bailey's father Lee Cooper, 31, told PEOPLE. "We got told the news late August that he wasn't going to survive. We were told it was days to weeks. We were very open with him. He was taking it in ... He was thinking, 'Oh no, I won't meet my sister.'"

Bailey was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2016. He has another brother Riley, who is now seven-years-old. Bailey's family said the ailing boy was rejuvenated when he heard about his future sister and that kept him going for some more time.

Bailey was always around his mother, listening to the baby inside her tummy by trying to listen to her. Then when Millie, the boys' sister was born on November 30, 2017, Bailey was absolutely ecstatic. For less than a month he got to spend with his baby sister, he did whatever he could do for her - feeding, bathing and changing clothes - till his health didn't allow him any more.

Though Bailey is no more, the Cooper family does its bit to make him an evergreen memory and tells Millie, who is just over a year now, about his late brother. We all hope that the little girl will grow up remembering her caring brother who she met for only about a month after her birth.