I closed my eyes as the thoughts and memories kept rushing through my mind. I felt as if the waiting room walls were closing in on me. I couldn’t breathe. I felt myself being suffocated. I had to get out before I died. I ran out of the hospital and found a quiet spot where I sat and cried like I never cried before. I thought about the role my mom had played in my life and how she made me into the person I was now. I remembered how she had been there through all the good and bad times in my life. I couldn’t imagine my life without her to share in the milestones that were yet to come.

At the time I didn’t know much about Cancer or the rate of survival and I didn’t know what would happen next. The only thing I knew was that soon I would have to go back into the surgery waiting room and face the outcome. Hour after hour passed with no news. They say that no news is good news, but when y you’re sitting in the hospital waiting room no news is torture as your mind plays out all the worse case scenarios. Finally, the doctor came out. I remember wanting to run up to him and ask all the questions that had gone through my mind that day, yet being afraid of what the answers to those questions might be.

I remember the look on my brother’s face as the doctor told us that she was in recovery now and had done well, but the hardest part was still to come. He said they would have to do radiation therapy and that could be really hard on a person. The doctor wasn’t sure if he would have to put her through chemotherapy, but he did tell us that it would be a long and hard road back to recovery. After the surgery, there were some complications and my mother developed a bad infection. There were many times when I feared the worse was to come. It was hard trying to put on a strong front when deep inside I was so scared. I would ride the bus to the hospital to see her and never knew how I would find her doing. It was always hard walking into the room because the person laying on the hospital bed didn’t look like my mother. My mother had always been a very strong woman and the woman laying in the hospital bed looked so small and frail.

One night I sat beside my mother’s hospital bed with my head in my hands praying to a God that I felt had deserted me a long time ago. I didn’t know what was going to happen and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I sat weeping silent tears of hopelessness and fear when I felt my mother’s hand stroke my hair.

“Don’t cry,” she whispered. “Everything is going to be okay. I’m going to beat this” I tried to say something, anything, but I couldn’t find the words to voice my thoughts. My tears started to run faster as she spoke. “You have to be strong. Your brother and sister are looking to you for strength.”

“how can I be strong?” I finally let myself look up into her eyes. “How can you be so strong?”

She wiped the tears from my eyes like she had done so many times when I was a child. I’m strong because you look to me for strength.” Those words made me cry harder. ”Wipe your tears son, because I will beat this. Maybe there is a reason for why this happened to me. God doesn’t give someone more than they can handle.”

“What reason?” I tried to wipe the tears from my eyes but they came faster “what reason can God have to give anyone Cancer? And why you?”

“maybe it’s so that I can be a stronger person and I can help someone else go through what I’m going through now, but that’s not for us to question or try to reason.“ Before I could say anything else my mom asked me to make her a promise. “Promise me that no matter what happens you’ll be strong and you will live your life to the fullest with no regrets because in the end we only have our memories and I want you to have good ones.”

“I promise.” I whispered as I buried my head in my hands and cried the last of my tears.

No one ever said that life was easy. Through the years I’ve had good times, bad times, and everything in between. As I sat on the bus, huddled against the cold I couldn’t help but think of the things that happened since that day in the hospital waiting room when my mom whispered the words, “they found cancer.” Maybe my mom was right all along- maybe she had to go through this so that would be strong enough to help other people go through what she had already gone through herself, but then again, that’s not for us to question or try to reason.

As I got off the bus I didn’t know what was going to happen. I did know that no matter what the future held, everything was going to be all right. I had come out of this a changed person and I would never look at things the same way as I had before. As corny as it sounds, it’s true that none of us is guaranteed a tomorrow, but we do have today and what we choose to do with it determines how great our life will be when we look back on it.