Calendar inspiration dies | Canterbury News | Local News in Canterbury

Helen Maranesi - the inspiration for the Parkhouse Calendar featured on the Star last Friday ? lost her battle against Melanoma cancer this week.

Helen had fought a valiant fight against the cancer, surviving seven months longer than the two months doctors told her she would live when she was diagnosed in April.

But on Wednesday evening she passed away with her husband Shane and daughters Stephanie, 10, and Ashleigh, eight, at her side.

Her husband's boss, Noel Dick, said Helen had seen Shane on the front page and got "a good smile" out of seeing him as a pin-up boy.

Dick said the family were preparing arrangements for a funeral, probably to be held on Saturday.

Helen's plight moved the firm Shane worked for, Parkhouse Landscape and Garden Supplies, to bare all for a calendar in the same vein as the movie Calendar Girls.

The photographs in the calendar show Shane and the rest of the team in potentially compromising, yet tasteful positions.

Money raised from the sales of the calendars will go towards the Nurse Maude centenary hospice, where Helen spent three months.

Dick said so far enough money had come in to buy a new hi-low bed for the hospice. The beds give patients freedom to heighten or lower the beds on their own.