Hope is a very powerful thing to me. It was the hope for a better life that gave my parents the courage to immigrate from the Soviet Union to America in their early 20s. My mother, momichka as I would call her, worked hard every day and instilled in me this hope for a better life. She didn’t know English when she first started going to school, so she self-taught herself from the classes she took and spent hours translating material from Russian to English. Through years of striving towards her goals and endless nights of studying, she became an RN nurse when I was thirteen years old. I looked up to her so much in so many different ways. She was my cheerleader and motivation for going to school, and I was hers. When she was studying I was studying too, and together we had an inseparable bond. She is the reason I want to go to medical school, and the fundamental reason why I love science so much. The light she had within her was like a fire; she knew no limit and could blind others with her captivating spirit. But one day, that fire cultivated down to embers, and the light was put out. My mom, like so many others, struggled silently. When she took her own life, a part of me ended too. She used to tell me all the time that I was her soul, and she was mine as well. Finding out that your parent has died is something no one can prepare you for. No amount of exposure to grief can ease the pain when you find out that your parent didn’t want to live anymore. At first, I wanted to join her, for the fight and will to live was less important than the reconnection I wanted with my momichka. It took countless appointments of therapy, insurmountable vulnerability in grief support groups, friends and family, and courage within my own self to want to continue this life. The strength that I have been able to withhold inside of myself did not grow from the dark contrast of grief. Instead, my strength has been rooted in hope, and my new hope is this; to honor my mother by striving for my dreams. The most important focus of my dreams are to serve others and fight the stigma over mental health. Specifically, I want to help others by giving back and offering my own resources over suicidal prevention and mental health. I intend to do this by using entrepreneurship and my future medical degree to create a nonprofit clinic for those in need of these resources in rural Minnesota. What matters most in my life is extending a hand towards those in need of it. The achievement of this goal will require endless studying, sacrifices, and humility; all that my mother had well resembled, and that’s why it’s a fight I’m willing to make.