Why I Ride ...
One day when I was in fourth grade I came home from school and saw my mom lying on the couch. She said that she had a really bad headache. I assumed that this was from having a busy life. After this headache dragged on for a week my dad took her to the hospital. She didn't come home for three months. At the hospital my parents were told that my mom had brain cancer. This scared me and my sisters but we were still a little too young to fully understand how serious it actually was. She had brain surgery after a day in the hospital.
It was three weeks later before we got to see her again but she was never the same. When we finally got to visit her we expected to see the same bright and happy woman that we knew as our mom. Instead she was unrecognizable and acted in a very strange way which scared us. She couldn't walk or use the entire left side of her body. She also couldn't remember things. Seeing her in this condition made me start to slowly see how bad this cancer is, watching it take away the liveliness and personality of a person who had so much of it.
The next visit our dad told us that mom was acting more like herself. This excited us! When we walked in our mom was smiling and happy to finally getting back to her old self. It was still a sad visit for me and my sisters though. She had started chemotherapy and had lost all of her hair. This was our first time seeing her this way. She had beautiful long black hair that I never took notice of until I saw her like this.
Finally, after a summer of visiting her in the hospital she was able to come home. I loved having her home with us because I could finally sit with her after school and talk with her. I liked to spend this time with her because I knew how much she enjoyed talking with us. The highlight of her day, she said, was when we came home from school. She spent most of her final year inside because she hated being in a wheelchair and was embarrassed to go out because she hated the way that she looked.
For the next seven months my mom was in and out of the hospital. Her condition steadily worsening. I grew used to this lifestyle of sitting with my mom and going into a hospital in Boston occasionally to see her when she would have to go back in. I also grew to accept her condition and thought that it was only temporary. We lived like this until one day in March my dad told me that there was nothing more that the doctors could do. That she probably won’t live past June. This, at first, made me angry at the doctors for thinking that there was nothing that they could do. It wasn't until her last week of life that I realized how selfish my anger of her passing away was.
But only two weeks later, while at a dinner for the first night of Passover, my dad gathered me and my sisters up and told us that there was a strong possibility that our mom was going to die that night. My sisters and I were not ready for this, we had planned for not saying goodbye for an other two months, but the cancer had other plans. When we got home we dashed into the house and into the dark room where she lay peacefully. Breathing as lightly as possible. We spent hours holding her hands and telling her that it was okay, and that we were ready to let her go, but she wasn't ready to give up just yet. She put up her fight for an other three days until finally, on April 6, 2007 at 8:45 P.M. she passed away.
My mom was known as the funny one by all of her friends as well as being the one who laughed the most. I knew her as a mom who was always willing to help me out with any problem and would also help me to express how I felt in any tough situation. She was very good at listening and had a way of making the person speaking get the feeling that they are the only two people on in the world. I loved talking with her and our conversations would almost always involve laughter and make me feel better if I was sad or angry about something.
In her memory I ride in the Pan Mass Challenge with my dad, my sister, cousins, uncles and family friends. The full team, in four years, growing to more then twenty people raising almost $90,000 last year and the pmc in total, with thousands of riders raising over 33 million dollars last year, has contributed over $300 million to the Jimmy Fund and the Dana-Farber Cancer Research Institute.
However, there are still many parents and brothers and sister, sons and daughters who have to say goodbye to their families a lot earlier then they should have to. This is a sad truth.
For those who have not lost their lives and are still fighting there is still a chance of life. A chance to laugh again. A chance to watch your sons and daughters grow up and a chance to share more laughs and smiles with the world around them. What contributes a great deal to these people who get a second chance at life is the generous donations made by the friends of the riders of this event.
I hope that this has opened your eyes to the tragic but true reality about the horrors of cancer. I also hope that it has inspired you to help contribute and play a part in eliminating this disease which takes the lives of over one hundred thousand children every year as well as more then seven and a half million adults . So please, if you donate, do not donate with me in mind. Donate thinking of all of the sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, cousins, grandmas, and grandpas who will not have to say an early good bye to their families and who can live the life that they deserve because of your donation.
Thank you very much if you have read through this entire letter, please donate and it will be greatly appreciated.
To donate, go to http://www.pmc.org/egifts/BM0230
Thank you for reading,
your friend,
Ben
