By Requel Jasmine
The statistics have always lingered in my mind: one in eight.
That’s how many women in America will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. My mother, Requitta, was one of them—the one in eight. (American Cancer Society, 2024)
I don’t remember much about her journey with the disease. I was only around four or five when she was diagnosed. What I do remember are the quiet hospital rooms, the rhythmic beeping of machines, and my mother’s arms wrapped around me as I drifted to sleep beside her. Her body was frail, but to me, it still felt like home.
My brother and I would curl up in her hospital bed, believing she’d get better—that she’d come home like she always did. But over time, I realized this back-and-forth, this living between hospital visits and short stays at home, was our new normal.
We traveled from hospital to hospital, treatment center to treatment center, my father leading us through the maze of her illness. Until the day the doctors said there wasn’t much more they could do. The treatments had lost their power. Hospice became the final word.
When my mother passed, we didn’t get to say goodbye.
Years later, at 24, I asked my father a question that had been living inside me since childhood. “Why didn’t she fight longer?”
