Crystal Willcuts: Remembering the beauty that was my mother

Sometimes bravery is the smallest of things, a grain of sand lying under a mountain of regret. This, I felt as I watched my mother die. Exactly two years before the moment she left this world, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It started with a pain in her breast that wouldn’t go away. She mentioned it to me as I was flying out the door on my way to work. I shared a house with my parents and she cared for my 1 year old son. I told her to see a doctor as I was leaving. I only realize now how scared she must have felt. She had yearly mammograms which were always normal. When my mother went through menopause she began taking hormonal supplements to help with her own fluctuating hormones and their side effects. It was before studies showed a connection between that type of therapy and an increased risk in breast cancer. She didn’t know. No one knew.

We were living in California, but she returned to our home state of South Dakota to see her own doctors. Because of work, I couldn’t be with her as she sat in her doctor’s office alone and received what she called “a death sentence”. Again, she was alone in the hospital facing a mastectomy. I was in Georgia for work and my father couldn’t face this new reality, his wife had cancer. I sent flowers. I called her after her surgery. I sent a card. But I wasn’t there. I never sat with her during a chemotherapy session, of which there were many. I never waited for her as she underwent radiation treatments. I was there when her beautiful dark brown hair was cut away and watched her pick out a wig. I listened to her get sick. I watched her slowly disappear.

I don’t know where I was. For the two years from her diagnosis to her passing, I can only tell you of the moments that stick out the most, like the sharpest edges of broken glass.