The story of Jade Goody is both sad and |inspiring, and also challenging. It is sad that such a young woman has been diagnosed as being terminally ill with cervical cancer, but also inspiring in that she is doing all she can to earn some money in her last days to help provide for her children’s future.

Her story is also challenging because she is making people pay attention to the reality of terminal illness, and she is doing it in a way which is in conflict with the traditional way in which people face up to such trauma.

Most individuals and their families tend to protect their privacy at such a time of great strain and sensitivity. Terminal illness and death are deeply |disturbing issues which most people would chose to deal with in their own way, but certainly well away from the public gaze.

Jade Goody is different. Her main talent has been to make her name in front of the cameras, and she has chosen to spend her last days in the public spotlight as well.

There is perhaps a degree of middle-class snobbery in criticising this young woman whose main talent seems to have been in generating publicity, but that is her choice.

She is certainly clever enough to try to make the best of her daunting circumstances and to leave something behind for her two young boys.

A great deal hinges on the way in which these final scenes in a much-publicised life are handled, and the arrangements for her scheduled wedding tomorrow to Jack Tweed are best described as “ fluid”.

Tweed was sentenced for assaulting a teenager with a golf club and is required to return to his |mother’s house each evening, although this was amended yesterday to exclude his wedding day.

Even Max Clifford, the publicist friend of Jade who has handled some of the most bizarre stories of |recent years, said as late as Friday evening, |“Everything at the moment is a kind of organised chaos.”

The media, which has already given enormous publicity to Jade in the good days as well as the bad, must not allow tomorrow’s ceremony to develop into a “circus”, and this applies equally to the period following the wedding, and right to the final stages of this extremely sad story.

It must be remembered that, at the heart of all this publicity, is the grim reality of a young woman who has been centre-stage in this unlikely drama and is now facing her final curtain.

Her choice in living, and dying, in her own way has inevitably brought the public’s attention to the potential ravages of cervical cancer, and she may well have helped to save lives by encouraging countless women to take necessary checks on their health.

Jade has also shown commendable concern for her children, and the large sums generated through her ordeal may help to give them at least a better financial base.

However, a mother’s love and life are literally without price, and Jade Goody cannot control the final stages of this tragic drama.

Whether people think she is right or wrong, in the end she is a human being who needs our sympathy — and not the condemnation of dispassionate strangers — during the last stages of her life’s journey.