Shortlisted Entries

Pritika Sharma

Pritika Sharma

  • Age: 22
  • City: Boston, USA
What it means to be a strong and resilient woman is something my mother has taught me through the way she has and continues to live her life. As someone who lives far from her family, for me, every great moment of interaction becomes a cherished experience. Conversely, moments of pain and suffering turn into a heightened feeling of sadness and longing in which the only thing I wish for is my family’s wellbeing. Fall of 2019 was one such moment for my entire family as my mother got diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. Shock as a feeling and lived experience does not even begin to capture how we felt. Life felt unfair and bleak as all of us, my parents and sister in India and me in the States, tried to make sense of this awful situation and find the strength and hope to move forward. No one expects something like this to happen to them or their loved ones; we were no different.
I always knew my mother was strong. I had witnessed it during a plethora of tumultuous times in our life: from tensions and divisions within our extended families to my father’s bypass surgery, and then losing her father. During these times, I never saw her falter or lose hope for a meaningful future; even in her tears, there was unparalleled strength. As cancer became an ugly reality and started debilitating not only her body but also her spirit, I saw pain and shock in my mother’s eyes and a perennial question: why me? The surgeries, chemotherapy, and then radiation all contributed to sickness not just in the body but also in her life. Since I had never seen my mother this physically and emotionally weak, it was truly one of the most horrendous phases of my life – to see your parent in pain and not be able to take that away is an experience I never wish upon anyone.
Given the shock and sadness of this situation, I truly became blind to the resilience and hope that mother displayed during this time. Every video call, every phone call, every message, she would talk to me as if nothing had happened. Even though her reaction of downplaying her cancer frustrated me initially, I later understood how her way of coping with her illness was enmeshed within desire to restore and renew herself. Yes, there were moments like losing all her hair that were extremely hard, but the way she recovered from the physical, mental, and emotional affects of cancer was remarkably graceful and powerful. By choosing to not let cancer take over her life, she reclaimed her sense of being. She kept up her work, all her social engagements, and wore her recovery as a mark of pride. Her resilience and ability to bounce back to live a vivacious life despite and in spite of all the challenges inspires me to live my everyday with gratitude and hope. This is my love letter to her.