An Inspirational Story: Happy Mother's Day!!

     There’s one reason I am out of prison right now: RDAP, the Residential Drug Addiction Program.  Nine months, five hundred classroom hours, living in an aluminum warehouse with ninety-nine other federal inmates in what was part boot camp, part therapeutic community.   Each morning began with Inspection followed by Community from 7:30 – 8:30.   A lot of crazy things went on in Community, many I can’t explain, but I can honestly say this: I sat with some stone cold convicts who’d been down anywhere between thirty months and thirty years and regardless of how they resisted treatment in the beginning, I saw positive change in each by graduation.

     One small part of Community was the reading of an inspirational story.  This became interesting when an inmate couldn’t read or spoke three languages but none were English.  Those who were able usually read a passage from Chicken Soup for the Soul which over time leads to stories being repeated.  To avoid this, when it was my turn, I read something I wrote that inspired me.

     This was my inspirational story:  The first time my mother had cancer I was fifteen.  She downplayed the event so much I hardly remember it.  Being a freshman at a new school I had so many obligations between sports, academics and social activities that I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.  She didn’t change her routine.  Mom drove us to school and wherever else we needed to go.  She cooked, cleaned and cared for my three sisters, father and I all while heading the music department and teaching at an all girl’s Catholic High School.

     When the cancer came back I was away in college.  “Don’t bother Jimmy, he’s very busy and I’ll be fine,” she told my sisters who immediately phoned me in Vermont.  But Mom was right, I was busy with extraordinarily important things and after an operation and several rounds of chemotherapy she was as good as new.

     The third time my mother had cancer I was there, I had to be.  Having just been busted by the feds she put up the bond to get me out.  I was there when she coughed up blood and told me it was only a cold.  I waited, even resorting to prayer, when they operated by going down her throat but couldn’t extract the whole tumor.  Then I prayed harder during the second operation when they opened up the length of her back with a crescent shaped incision to remove her entire left lung.

     Mom didn’t smoke, not a day in her life, but she stood by many years while other loved ones did.  When she felt her worst no one knew.  I have not a memory of hearing my mother complain and many of her wearing a smile.

     Finally I went to prison while Mom had more chemotherapy and an experimental treatment only 32 other subjects had tried.  Her doctors at Mass General told her if she could tolerate these drugs there was a 90% chance the cancer would not return.  I heard these medicines made her very sick, but of course I was not there.

     My Mother worked hard all her life and deserved to retire, but by working her son’s children could continue in schools they loved while she had the means to support them until his return.  I was in my freshman year at Fort Dix when I received the news; due to the poor economy the school where she worked was being sold to a developer.  Although I was away I could not get this out of my mind.   It tormented me day and night.  I knew my Mother, how she loved that school, and how this would adversely affect her more than any sickness.

     Several months passed before one day I received an unusual letter.  The envelope was larger and the contents thicker than normal.  I opened it to find a brochure for a new school with a note from Mom explaining how she had gotten our town to donate the abandoned building where she had gone to elementary school, obtained funding for renovations, and started a new private school.

    That was more than two years ago.  This September my daughter will enter the senior class of the new Nazareth Academy.   And there is a chance I will be able to see her graduate in June of 2011.

     Everybody clapped as they do each morning.  I headed back to my seat walking past Darareaksmey Nhean who suddenly stood up clapping with tears streaming down each cheek.  Then for the first time since I’d been in RDAP everyone followed his lead and stood.  This was wonderful, then I realized, Dara spoke only Khmer.
(Mom, some forgot me.  You wrote to me by letter, email or spoke with me on the phone everyday for three years.   My commissary was never empty, even all those months in the SHU.  And we didn't  talk simply to pass the time, feeling your pain was difficult but it was the strongest force in my recovery.  You rode with me through something a lot of people won't understand and would have cracked most on the high social ladder I use to climb.   I'm  humbled because you gave so much, without condition, when I needed it most and could not have been less deserving.   You taught, by example, my entire life.  I am ashamed it took so long and such extreme circumstance to make it sink in, but now I truly understand.  I love you too.  Happy Mother's Day.)