Friday is the 9th anniversary of my mother’s death.

My childhood fear was that my mother, a smoker, would contract lung cancer. In 1995, my worst fear came true. After chemotherapy and radiation, the cancer metastasized to her brain, and she repeated a cycle of brain tumour, treatment, improvement, and relapse until she died in 1997. This experience demonstrated for me the painful and frustrating nature of chronic disease. As a result, I first realized the personal relevance of healthy living. Although my mother was strongly committed to the “conventional medicine route”, her illness was the first major influence for me to become a naturopathic doctor. In an audio tape she left me after she died, she told me that her dream was for me to become a professional of some sort. She was thinking lawyer, doctor, engineer, etc, but I think ND also qualifies!

Every year I become more and more like my mother. Or, rather, I realize more and more how similar we really were. As a child I naturally had a stronger bond with my father and we got along (and still do) very easily. My father knows me better than anyone else in this world and has always been my primary source of advice and comfort. My mother and I, on the other hand, found it harder to understand one another. This was partially because we were so similar, but also because we just could not “speak the same language” it seemed. When my mother first got sick, it hit me (at age 15) pretty hard. I felt like I had always known that it would happen, but that it just COULDN’T happen, because how could I go on with my life if one of my parents died? The years of her illness are a blur to me – I think I tried to separate myself from it as much as possible. When she did pass away, it was a relief to me because I felt I could finally start my own life. Which I did – that was a key turning point in becoming who I am today.

Every year I also become more conscious of what I have lost. I don’t think about it every day, but when I do it is with a growing understanding of how MUCH I am missing because my mother is not here. While we struggled to connect when I was young, I now yearn for her perspective as an adult. I truly believe that our relationship was made to be between adults and unfortunately that will never be. Of course, this makes me sad. But, it is also comforting to me to know that that potential was there.