Hello, my name is Zecorà, and this is my story. Auntie Maxine and Uncle Charles. These 2 are my family members who I am trying to save. My auntie has cancer and my uncle has some type of hole in his heart (as I was told) and the doctors have no clue what is wrong with him. My father is 62 and still working with no end in sight. I want to help out my family members, but I am just 19 years old. I am in the process of trying to save up for a car to help out with expenses.

I was just raising money for my mother 6 years ago when I was 13 years old. I remember like it was yesterday.

My mother was driving me to school and just dropped a bombshell that she had cancer, stage 4. I didn’t know what the weight of that was, I was 12. I thought “My mother dying? That only happens in movies, surely she’ll be okay.” You never think it’d happen to you until it does. She even was cancer free for a month or so! But of course, it came back, worse. So what I did was start a fundraiser. I raised 2000 or so dollars. When I showed my mother, she started crying and trying to find a way to get me to Japan as soon as she could. Looking back, I now know that was because she knew she was dying and she wanted to see her baby achieve her dream. I did about 2 years later at the age of 15.

About less than a year after being told she had cancer, I had to deal with seeing my mother deteriorate. She shaved her hair, she could barely walk up the steps, she couldn’t even use the bathroom. She had a tube tied to her. She was in unfathomable pain, she told the doctors to just let her go. Even while I was seeing all of that, I thought she’d be okay. Wishful thinking on my part. Next thing you know, she contracted covid from one of the doctors! She already had a rare type of cancer the doctors have never seen, so the covid just increased her pain ten fold. I couldn’t even bare to look at her. I was in denial. 14 year old me saw my mother as the strongest figure in my life. A sergeant.

Finally, March 2nd, 2021, my mother passed away. I wasn’t even able to tell her I loved her before she was gone. I had failed my mother. I was a horrible daughter. The 2000 I made from my last fundraiser went into funeral expenses. It costed 13k for her to die, and I couldn’t do anything about it. She was my emotional support. We were dead broke but she and my father gave my sister and I as much as they could. We got evicted together, stayed in a shelter together, and went through all the hardships the world threw at us as a family. We only got through it because of my mother. She was the foundation of my family. The world lost a wonderful woman who brightened up a room whenever she walked in. My grandmother lost her daughter, my uncle lost his sister, my father lost his wife, and I lost my mother.

She was only 46.

The grief I’ve felt for the past 5 years isn’t anything I’d wish on my worst enemy. I’ve had people joking at my old highschool about her death. I’ve had my managers and coworkers telling me she didn’t do a good enough job raising me just because I missed a spot while mopping. I deal with my hair falling out from stress, I’m anemic, and then I’m depressed and anxious all the time. Nothing has helped my grief, it is just something I have gotten used to.

Then my grandmother passed away from my dad’s side in 2022. Then my uncle from cancer in 2023. My other uncle is battling some unknown illness (he has to walk with a cane at 60 because his legs have gotten weak! He used to be able to do everything, but the illness made him unable to even play in my dads band anymore).

Then my mom’s ex wrecked her car about a year or 2 after she passed. Something I could be using to remember her by and could have been driving now. It’s gone forever.

I’ve dealt with depression since the age of ten because of the physical abuse and sexual abuse from the age of just 6 years old to just 2 years ago. My poor parents had no clue. They were already having money issues and I didn’t even know what was going on so even tell anybody. My dad only found out after my mother passed and I felt horrible about it. Him dealing with all the finances with 0 help, him dealing with his wife passing, and then him finding out about his daughter’s have been assaulted from when they were children. The only reason he had no clue was because he was out all the time making money for our family. Barely home so he could pay our rent, our bills, our food, and somehow some things to make his daughters happy. Same with my mother. To this day he’s still struggling, thankfully not as much as before but he still is.

I just want to try, I want to try again to raise just a little bit of money for my family. I don’t want to lose any more family members and just help my family out. My dad is 62 and still working extremely hard, he’s supposed to be retiring around this age but at this pace he’ll be retiring past 70. I want his last years to be a little less stressful. He’s dealing with 2 hernias and is pre diabetic (diabetes runs in the family, his favorite sister died from it). He doesn’t want to go through that surgery again, I assume it’s because he’s scared of the pain and he has so many things he has to do.

I know I’m just speaking into the void but, even if it’s just a few dollars, I’d appreciate it as much as if it was a hundred.

Thank you so much for reading if you’ve made it to the end! I am very grateful.