One of my aunts often calls me one of the most courageous people she’s ever met. However, I don’t really believe her when she says that because for me, the most courageous person I’ve ever met is my mother, who fought breast cancer for 9 years. I always say that I grew up with her cancer, too, since it first started when I was only a year old. As a kid, I never realized the gravity of what it meant to have cancer. I knew she was in a lot of pain, but I never thought that one day I would lose my mom to breast cancer. It had always been her and me from the day I was born, and I believed it would be that way forever. When she first passed away, I thought that it was my fault because I sometimes didn’t help her enough with housework or because I was a capricious child.
My earliest memory of her cancer is at age 5 when we moved to Montreal, and at that time I didn’t really know what she was battling, nor really acknowledge it. For me, she was just my mom and she wasn’t sick: we were still able to go out together and have fun. 5-year-old me had no idea that something could be wrong.
The seriousness of breast cancer really dawned on me when I was 9 – I was in my bedroom and she was in the kitchen, and all the sudden I heard screaming. She was screaming in pain and asking God to take her if that was the pain she was supposed to go through. I remember running up to her and telling her to not say that kind of stuff, but she was crying, and seeing her cry made me cry.
As I said earlier, for me my mother is the most courageous person I’ve ever met because even though she was sick and in pain she always did everything to make me happy, to give me everything I needed and wanted hide how much pain she was in.
We are currently in October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so let’s remember all the people who fought against this disease and lost their lives to it, even though we should remember them all the time, and think about those who are currently sick. If you want to get involved, check out the Breast Cancer Society of Canada for ways you can help their cause to end breast cancer once and for all.