My Mother, My Best Friend

By Stephanie Schwartz
Columbia University

It seems to be pretty much a given that college students aren't very big fans of their parents. They give us unreasonable rules when we come home from school. They call too often. They pry into every detail of our lives.

My mother doesn't do any of these things. But wait. Before you get jealous and ask to clone her for yourself, you might want to find out why. When I was eight years old, my mother went for her annual breast exam. The doctor told her everything looked alright, but that there were some slight calcifications and she should come back in six months for another exam. Not having a very deep knowledge of medicine, my mother thought that a calcification was the result of drinking too much milk and didn't think much of it. Before the six months were up, she discovered a lump in her left breast. The calcifications, it turned out, were the early stages of this lump. At first, her situation looked optimistic. She had a mastectomy and chemotherapy and went into remission. It seemed the whole situation was just a terrible scare and we were all relieved that it was over.

When I was eleven, the cancer metastasized to her bones.

Again, we were optimistic. The University of Connecticut was developing an experimental treatment for exactly this problem and doctors were hopeful that the treatment would work for her. It did...for a few months. For the next six years, she was in and out of various hospitals to treat the cancer in her bones, brain, and eventually her liver. When I was sixteen and my younger brother was thirteen, only eight days after he became a Bar Mitzvah, my mother passed away. She had been a successful computer programmer, president of our synagogue's sisterhood, president of the local Hadassah chapter, and a loving sister and mother to our entire community.

When I walked into the sanctuary of my synagogue on the day of her funeral and saw that it was packed, I realized just how many lives she had touched. During the week of shiva my house was full from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep. Just as my mother had affected so many members of the community, so many people came to the house to offer words of condolence, food of every kind and just plain, good company. So many people cooked us dinner that we actually had to buy a second freezer to store all the food.

A year and a half later, I was cleaning my room and packing for college. I found a box that I kept all sorts of letters in. I don't think I had ever sat down to read all of them, but I decided to read them on that day. Among the letters written to me at camp and invitations to friends' B'nai Mitzvah celebrations, I found a letter from my mother, dated only a few months before she was diagnosed with cancer. At that time she was working full time almost an hour away. She was gone before I woke up in the morning and didn't come home until dinner time. She left the letter for me to find years later. In the letter, my mother apologized that she couldn't spend more time with me and wished that there was some way she could be home more.

There is so much irony in the fact that she got sick so soon after writing this letter. From that time on, she was always home to see us off to school and welcome us home in the afternoon. Every day, when my brother and I came home from school, we would climb into her bed to watch TV and do our homework. On her better days, she would muster up enough energy to chaperone our school field trips or take us and our friends to the beach. On her worse days, we would tiptoe into her bedroom to give her a hug and kiss and sit quietly at the foot of her bed waiting for her to wake up.

In less than sixteen years, my mother and I managed to build a stronger relationship than most mothers and daughters do in much longer lifetimes. We knew our time together was short, and so we made the most of it.

At a time when most girls hate their mothers, I found a best friend in mine.

[Posted 6/25/03]