Imagine it is your senior year, and graduation is just around the corner. You graduate 6 months early in January 2012, as your hard work during your high school career has paid off. You kick start your lifelong work journey with a new job at a quaint little pet store. Life seems to be going well. Until it abruptly ends on December 23, 2012. Memories begin to flood in of a time when I was small. My mother sat my sister and I down to tell us she was about to leave us to undergo radiation and chemotherapy for cancer. Being so little I didn’t realize the magnitude of that word, or the powerful impact it had on my family, especially my mother. It took its toll on her and for weeks we visited her at a cancer center where she eventually beat it. Years later it would return just when everything was looking bright. The year prior to her passing on that fateful day in December, she began to lose weight. She became thinner than myself at the time but we all thought it was her ‘diet’ she claimed to be on. Little did we know my mother’s cancer had returned and she was feeling worse than she had let on. Christmas time had come around and my parents decided to go shopping for last minute little Christmas details. Upon returning home, my father realized he forgot some Christmas cards and would drive back to the store to retrieve them. Upon returning home from a 30 minute trip, my father discovered my mother deceased on the couch where she usually sat during her days home. She had expelled copious amounts of blood all over herself and the floor around her. Two days later, we got up on Christmas Day, just my father and I. Presents under the tree that he could barely watch me open. It was the last time we opened presents under the same roof again, as Christmas would no longer be the same. That year’s Christmas card bore my father’s handwriting, “we will be alright.” It was the only time my father wrote out my Christmas card, and the first time I realized I would never see my mother’s handwriting again. It is fourteen years later, and her absence still rattles my family. We speak of her often, especially around holidays when we laugh about her silly jokes and comments. My oldest sister continues to place out her unwrapped gift to our mother, my father remains a single man, and I live every day looking in the mirror as the spitting image of the woman who created me. Who I lost way too soon, and hope to see again someday. Cancer changes people. The ones who have it, and the ones who have to watch their loved ones struggle with it. I learned that daughters need their mothers. Younger you doesn’t want your mom to be as “mothering,” you just want space to be your younger self. Adult you wishes you had her there always. I have learned how the years go by and the pain changes, but it grows into something different. A never ending longing for a persons presence. I have learned to sympathize and understand those dealing with situations of the same matter. I’ve learned that my mother was an impact on our lives while alive, and in passing and it shows year after year in our stories and memories.