My Mother's Story from California

This story is about my mom. She is the youngest of eight kids. When she was in kindergarten her father was brutally murdered in Fiji. She was a brilliant student but didn’t go to college. She had an arranged marriage to my father. My father turned out to be abusive and an alcoholic. My mom left him and came back to live with her family.

Having being an Indian woman, and divorced even her family was not very supportive of her and what she has been through. Growing up I remember how difficult life was. We always lived with someone else, mainly her family and to be honest they weren’t very kind. They took advantage of our situation in every way they could. I remember when she told me that I was her only child, and she could not give me what I needed (though I never asked for things like most kids do), but when we got to America, life will be better. She promised.

When I was 13 we moved here, and mom worked two jobs to pay her own family’s rent, and endure anything and everything they put us through. In all this, I was diagnosed with severe depression and my mom finally decided to leave her family. We moved to San Jose.

Soon my mom was laid off from both jobs and we had no choice but to move to Sacramento to live with another uncle of mine (whom we lived with before in Fiji and wasn’t a joy). Finally, we managed to get on our feet somehow. She never remarried because her focus was always on me. She starting working at a good job and was there for five years. Something happened and she lost that job, and her medical benefits. Within a few months her breast cancer showed up. She didn’t say a thing to me at first because she knew she had no medical benefits and this would cause us hardship because we had no money. She finally told me what was happening and I took her to the hospital after buying temp insurance.

I started working full time, and am going to school full time. It took ten thousand dollars over the course of a month for doctors to diagnose her with IBC. Surgery couldn’t be done because the tumor was too big. She went through chemo, two surgeries and radiation and all through this she knew she would make it. July 30th 2007 was her appt to begin reconstruction, but a month ago they found a spot on her legs which lead to multiple MRI's. A week ago her doctor called us in and told us her cancer had spread to her brain and lungs...and she has six months or less to live. She is on steroids, going through radiation as well.

She is all the family I have. Her family, no matter how cruel or that some of them didn’t speak for 10+ yrs but when they heard the news, most of them cried. For once in the 20 yrs that I have been alive, this family is emotionally alive and real. My mom tells me that she isn’t ready to die, she says "when I hated life and wanted to die, death never came. Now when I want to go to school and finish my degree, buy my first house, see you grow up, married and play with my grandkids.. now that I love life, death is here."

I have faith, that she might just come out of this okay...so if by Oct 20th, she is still here, please find it in your heart to make her life a little brighter. She is my world, and if I must let her go, I want these six months to be the happiest of her life.

Sacramento, California