October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, it’s the time we celebrate survivors and the time we remind ourselves that prevention can save lives. There’s lots of pink and lots of events where we can honor the journey we have survived or honor the lives of those whom we have lost. But the message is much deeper than pink and the importance so much enduring.

When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was 14 and beginning my freshman year in high school. She’d found the lump herself and was scheduled for surgery on a Friday morning. The night before surgery there was a big event at the organization she worked for, they were opening their new building. To this day, so many years later, I can see her in a beautifully patterned long dress. She’d worked hard to lose some weight and she was excited to wear a flattering, and elegant, dress. She was not one for eye makeup but she let me do my clumsy best to glamorize her look. I watched her walk out of their bedroom, ready for the party, and I can still see how radiant she was.

I had no way to know that everything was going to change the following day. I wonder if she did. She was a woman who lived and breathed the words “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything,” so her feelings and fears were always tightly held.

On that Friday, when we got home from school, Dad told us that she had breast cancer and that they’d had to remove her breast. We all went to the hospital and I could see that her chest was massively bandaged, that there were tubes and wires issuing from the bandages, along with IVs dripping into her arm. We stood at her bedside, my brother and I huddled together, holding onto each other’s arms, not sure what to do, not sure what to think. She opened her eyes and looked blearily at my dad. “One or both?,” she asked and my father looked confused. “Did they take one or both?,” she repeated and he now looked horrified. “One,” he said, “one.” She closed her eyes again.

My father reacted the way he often did when he was worried or when a situation was out of his control. He became angry. He made an appointment to see the surgeon and came home irate that the surgeon had showed him, pressing into the pad of his thumb with his forefinger, how large the tumor was that he had found. Dad felt, based on no medical knowledge but his own instincts, that a cancer that size did not merit a radical mastectomy and the removal of lymph nodes. Of course he was wrong but that didn’t stop him from telling her that it was unnecessary, that the doctor was wrong, that this just should not have happened.

My mother, though angry and upset, never expressed it. She recovered, she forgave, she went on. I have a vivid, and still unsettling, memory of going to the department store with her to buy a prosthesis. I was standing around the lingerie department, no doubt checking out my adolescent self in one of the full length mirrors, while a saleswoman helped her in the dressing room. The saleswoman came out of the dressing room and was talking with her colleague about this “poor woman” who was “so disfigured” and how they’d have to special order a prosthesis for her because of the size of her (now singular) breast.

Moments later Mom came out of the dressing room and I realized that they’d been talking about her. I was angry and embarrassed and, for the first time, I realized how much her life had changed and how hard this was although the thought was fleeting.

Not quite seven years later the battle began again. Cancer is a difficult enemy to vanquish and it made another attack, this time metastasized in her bones and, eventually, everywhere. The last time my brother and I saw her she was in the hospital, oxygen tubes in her nose, but still herself, still worried more about us than she was about what was happening with her. I told her I’d see her again in a week, making the now familiar trek from Wisconsin, where we lived, to western New York. She held my hand and smiled but her eyes told a different story.

My brother and I were alone in the elevator leaving the hospital and as we looked at each other, tears streaming, I said “We will never see her again.” He nodded and we held each other. But as the elevator doors opened, our joint denial was back in place. A few days later, she was gone.

I’d had dreams of taking my mother all the places she would talk about wanting to go. I’d had dreams of her being a loving and involved grandmother to my children. I thought we had years but, now, as I look back, it feels as if it were just minutes.

This month I hold onto that pink as a tribute to her memory, as a recognition of the extraordinary woman that she was. I know that my story is not unique, that I am not alone with the loss that this terrible disease has wrought. As I think about nurturing my full heart I know that hers was always full, in a way that mine will never be. May her memory, and the memory of all those who have battled this disease, always and forever be a blessing,