The pain and suffering I experienced with typical childhood nicks and ailments pales in impact to what I experienced at age 10 when my mother developed breast cancer. My mother was a healer who lived a very healthy lifestyle – with wholesome foods, close friends and family, lots of laughter, focused work, creative projects, and community work, all inspired and enriched by her deep and abiding Christian faith and practices. Well trained and practiced in the medical sciences, she was terrified – mostly for her three children and her husband – when she learned that she had what today is described as stage-IV (metastatic) breast cancer. Despite radical mastectomies, lymphadenectomies, and radiation treatments, it took a mere six months for the cancer to enter her brain and end her life. 

 

My mother’s death was both traumatizing