Imagine for a moment what your version of a perfect life looks like. Perhaps it’s a glamorous life filled with fame and fortune, or perhaps it’s a life where you are surrounded by family and close friends and have enough money where you don’t have to worry but still have to work to put food on the table, OR… it’s a life where it’s just you and your cats (let’s be honest, we all love cats).

Now, I want you to go to your perfect happy place and imagine your deepest fear materializing in the form of massive clouds that never get too close but are still visible in the distance. You know deep inside, no matter how much you ignore it that one day those massive clouds are going to change everything.

Well, between 1995 and 2001, my family and I were in our perfect happy place. We had everything we needed; we had enough to go out on adventures and enough to not worry about where our next meal was coming from. However, we had our own dark cloud in the distance, except this dark cloud was hiding behind a mountain, and this mountain was made of my family’s hopes and dreams.

Fast-forward to mother’s day 2002, my mom walks out of the hospital after investigating strange lumps around her breasts with a diagnosis of Stage 4 Terminal Breast Cancer and three months to live. The chronic illness cloud had come knocking on our door.

Remember that mountain of hopes and dreams? The hulking monster hiding behind CRUSHED it; everything we thought was possible now seemed totally unattainable.

My sisters, my father, my mother and me all gathered around the dinner table to talk about how we were going to approach this challenge and what in life was going to change. The first thing my mother said was, “I know the doctor gave me three months to live, but I assure you that I will be here far passed that”. From then on we outlined the most important things to consider:

• No matter what, family ranks above all else.
• We have to work hard to foster a positive energy in the home
• Be ready at a moments notice to help with anything and everything
• If anyone has a disagreement, take it outside
• Keep on laughing
• Be selfless
• Live by the silver lining
• Never stop being hopeful

Those were the eight points my father and mother laid out for us. The guiding principles that would help my sisters and I get through the thick of it and get my mother better, quicker.

Six years, five months and three weeks later, we were all around a dinner table reviewing the past years. We found ourselves around the dinner table again because my mother’s cancer had come back with a vengeance for the third time; it metastasized to the brain. This time, the prognosis was not one we could be positive about. However, we made the best of it and continued to laugh, cry and enjoy our time together.

My mother taught us the following:

• Keep your family your number one priority
• Keep a positive mindset
• Don’t let negative people or bad news keep you from living your life
• Learn to laugh at yourself
• Embrace your situation
• Your doctors are your second family – learn and teach together

Every lesson you learn comes with a weight and these lessons will be with me forever.