Tamara Fields

The story that inspired this is my mother. She was diagnosed with cancer a couple years ago and during that time we also had another family member – my sister in law – that also had been diagnosed with cancer so we had two members of our family diagnosed and going through treatments. I was traveling at the time so I was gone throughout the week – you know, Monday through Friday. When I found out about my mom I was the only child living in the same city as her, but obviously I was gone during the week. I made the decision that I really wanted to be there and available to here. And part of doing that was making sure I was there for every single one of her chemo days. They're like 8 hour days where they inject various drugs into your system. To be there the first week after because that's typically the worst week in terms of your symptoms and your sickness – obviously that was going to be difficult with my role, my responsibility, my job and the fact that I traveled, but you know I just really thought about it and I felt like one of the most important things you can do is showing your love. And the way you show your love is through commitment and loyalty and sacrifice and making them the priority no matter what you have going on. And I made the decision that I wanted to be there for every chemo day and I was. So when we hit that last chemo day it was such a tremendous feeling for her and for me. Even though she wasn't done with her cancer journey at that point, it was still a big deal to her that I was there for every single one. She knew I'd take her, she knew i'd take her home, she knew I'd be there to work through whatever complications came out of that. I think it's important to show love in that same way that you would want to be loved. That's what I would want for me. She's doing so much better now. She's in remission and she only has one remaining minor surgery so we're really excited about that. Both her and my sister in law are in remission. We feel like we have come through some of the most difficult periods of our lives and we're very pleased. C: Tell me about your relationship with your mom before all of that. I think our family is unique in that – my father died when I was really young and my mother remarried, and then my step-father died. So just understanding that loss can happen very early and very unexpectedly in your life, I think forged the relationship with my mother and myself and my two siblings. We're all extremely close and I think that we value each other simply because we recognize that tomorrow I not promised and so it's really important to value them now and value them every day. And my mom is just a phenomenal woman.She's very strong. She raised all three of us in spite of losing two husbands. And she sacrificed everything for us. We were her life. All her time she always spent on us when she wasn't at work and I think she really focused on raising us to be assets to society. She's the nucleus of our family then and now. Because I was the eldest and there's somewhat of an age difference between us all, I was the one that took on that extra responsibility with her when my father died because I was 13 at the time. So I helped with my siblings. So our relationship evolved to where she's my mother, but she's also my friend. Now today, she's probably the closest friend I have. I talk to her every day and we spend a lot of time together, we take a lot of trips together, we're very very close. Obviously it was very hard when she got sick, but I would say that she is our heart and my siblings and I feel very strongly about that. As a result, my siblings are successful, they've done very well in life. And I feel like i've done very well in life and we attribute all of that to her integrity, her honor, her work ethic, her belief system, the fact that she made her family her focus, and so she absolutely deserves our honor our loyalty and our commitment. C: Tell me one lesson she's taught you. The biggest lesson that she taught us was to be independent to be honest. All 3 of us are extremely independent. Her perspective is that her responsibility is to raise us to be assets to society and part of doing that is teaching us how to think on our own, be responsible, take accountability. She used to tell us all the time 'My responsibility towards you ends at 18. I'll always be there for you emotionally but you need to have a future, go to college, get a job and make sure that you're contributing. My responsibility is not to keep taking care of you. And so she really taught us early on how to be independent and I think that that has served all of us very well.