Yesterday I wrote about my mother’s diagnosis with cancer.  Despite all the treatment she received and all the prayers said on her behalf, the cancer spread rapidly and she died the year I was ten, one short year after her diagnosis with breast cancer.

My mother was 31 years old.

I have now lived nearly two thirds of my life without my mother.  I remember her, but not as well as I would like.  I am lucky that I have had people to ask about her over the years.  She also evidently enjoyed writing, as I once found a notebook filled with poetry and a partially-used diary along with a couple of papers she wrote while in college.  I treasure these things for the insight they’ve given me into a woman I barely got the chance to know and for the insight into the child that I used to be.