Dearest Family and Friends,
Today is the day, once again!
LD/Lisa de Lima/Mom is back on her bike riding 78 miles from Bourne to Provincetown on Cape Cod with the Pan Mass Challenge (PMC). My mom rides, with thousands of others, to raise money to eradicate even the most rare of cancers. Specifically, she rides to support the Zakim Center for Integrative Therapies and Healthy Living at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). The DCFI is committed to enhancing the quality of life for cancer patients through wholistic methods like acupuncture, massage and nutrition to support the whole person.
For LD, PMC isn’t a fundraiser, it’s more of a representation of how she encounters the world. She shows up, does something that most people can’t imagine doing, and doing it with literally her whole heart.
Leading up to the this day, and all throughout it, my mom (and by transitive property, me) is overcome with emotion thinking about the meaning of it. The impact the money raised has one individuals and their families lives. Thinking about what it means that all of these people come together to do something so much bigger than themselves. And getting to be a part of it.
The moment I stepped out on the course today and saw bikers coming by, I burst into tears. I am my mothers daughter.
It is hard to know what it most impressive about my mom riding the PMC every year:
Is it the fact that she is biking 78 miles? Or that she doesn’t ride a bike any day of the year except for this one, just to ride with PMC? Or…is it that after riding 78 miles in the sun, the next day she says….”I feel fine?” (Which, not for nothing, makes it kind of awkward for me to say I feel tired after cheering in those conditions and my body hurts when I look at a bike).
Even with all of those remarkable feats, what is most impressive about my mom’s PMC ride, her 7th to date (on the week she turned 77 years old, HBD!) is that she LOVES every minute of it. Even though her toe does her (her only physical complaint) she finds joy and love and hope and beauty in every rotation of this experience and it emanates throughout her past PMC.
At 10:34AM she passed through Wellfleet so she’s approximately 15 miles from P-town. Send her some love in a text, a call, an email! She would will love hearing from all of you!!!
As always, thank you for your love and support,
Zanny
