I have black and white photographs that depict a happy couple on their wedding day in 1962.
The bride is smiling at the groom, full of hope, love, and promise of a long life together.
Colour pictures 10 years later show a family, which now includes a son and baby daughter, grinning from ear to ear in front of a farmhouse.
She was my mother. I never knew her.
Her name was Doris, the oldest of three siblings. She grew up in rural Saskatchewan and eventually became a teacher.
She eventually made her way to my hometown in rural Alberta, met my dad, fell in love and married him in July, 1962.
For 10 years, Doris taught Grade 5. She loved teaching and adored her students.
In her spare time, she embraced farm life - milking cows, helping with spring seeding and fall harvest. She thrived competing in gymkhanas and curling bonspiels.
In 1968, my brother was born. I followed four years later one January day, the town's New Year's baby.
But celebrations soon ended. A month later, mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. A mastectomy and radiation treatments followed in Edmonton.
Throughout treatment and after it was over, she remained optimistic she'd beat the disease. Letters to my neighbour on the farm reveal she still had a sense of humour. She worried about me and my brother and leaving us with our paternal grandmother who was also on the farm.
But it was not meant to be. Cancer metastasized to her liver. There was nothing more doctors could do. At 35, she died in August, 1972. I was eight months old.
My dad remarried in 1974. My sister arrived a year later to complete the family. The rest is history.
As I look through old pictures, 43 years later I'm almost a spitting image of her. Same face. Same smile. Same dimples. Same brown curly hair.
This weekend as I participate in the 24-hour Canadian Cancer Society's Relay for Life, which wraps up on Mother's Day, I'll definitely remember her. As I usually do, it's a given I'll shed a few tears and think about what she could've become.
I'll wonder if she's proud of me or has any advice for me as I navigate my own path through life. But questions remain, they always will.
This weekend at Masich Place, I'll remember and honour mom as I pledge to fight back. I'll do it for her sister and brother. My cousins, my brother and sister and my nieces and nephews.
I'll be there for my colleagues, friends and everyone else who has lost someone to cancer. It's the right thing to do.
