Strength and resilience: ‘Resilience doesn’t mean just to fight, it means to never quit’
By Tarah-Lynn Remillard
Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t change anything on my thoughts on what resilience is to me. It’s different for everyone. This is my story about my mother who passed into the Spirit World last June. She gave me the inspiration to be resilient. I learned it from watching her have quiet strength with her battle with cancer.
I would still look up to you, the way I looked up to you every day, Mom.
Thinking about resilience in this pandemic and the first person that comes to mind is my Mom. Even when she wasn’t feeling the greatest, she still found a way to hold her head up high and still look to the future in a positive way. For me, her resilience rang true until the day she passed. She was a very stubborn woman and always knew what she wanted – even if she had to fight her way to get it. She was someone who I looked up to, as most kids would look up to their parent. I was a kid who always wanted to be like my mom.
I wanted to have her strength and her stubbornness. You could see it even when she could no longer walk. When she was able to use her walker to go outside on the porch, you could see how hard it was for her and how much pain she was in. At the same time, she would always try to hide it and most times, she was good at hiding it. She had metastasizing inflammatory breast cancer that went into her bones and even after her mastectomy, she didn’t let anything stop her. My mom was very brave. When she was in pain, she wouldn’t let anyone see it; especially her granddaughter. She showed resilience through doing a lot, even with having cancer. She participated in a Terry Fox Run with my cousin and I. She always found someone to encourage her to continue the fight, whether it be my sibling or my niece. Even when laying in her hospital bed in pain she would allow her granddaughter sit with her and just have as much time as she could before she left for the Spirit World. She always told us her biggest support system was her family and we were all there for her. For a university assignment I had on resilience, we each chose a colour that represented something to our family. My older brother’s hand print was blue – the colour of my uncle J.C.’s cancer, my hand print was yellow and it represented my Mom’s bone cancer, my sister-in-law’s hand print was green which represented liver cancer (her grandfather’s cancer), and my niece’s footprint was pink which was symbolizing of my mom’s breast cancer.
I once asked her to explain what resilience and not giving up meant to her and this is what she said to me:
“According to Tarah-Lynn, I am the epitome of resilience. That is not who I am, I am just a fighter. When I was diagnosed with what they then called metastasizing inflammatory breast cancer, I found out that this affects only 1% of breast cancer patients, and 2% of the world breast cancer patients. It went into L2, L3, L4, and in both my hips. In the four years since my original diagnosis, it has now come back with a vengeance. I have had a hip replacement surgery that helped absolutely nothing. The tumours were too far advanced in my legs to adhere to bone or to plates or to hardware and now, I am left confined to a bed no longer able to walk. Tarah-Lynn says I am resilient because there’s a part of me that will always fight. Resilience doesn’t mean just to fight, it means to never quit; it means to never stop finding ways. I spent a lot of time doing radiation treatments that I know will do nothing, they won’t prevent the cancer from shrinking, they won’t prevent the cancer from stopping. All that I do won’t prevent the cancer from going anywhere else; all this was to do was to stop the pain. The pain is there and you learn to live it. You learn to endure it. You learn to understand it is. This is what I teach my daughter and how she can apply that to anything in her life. I have watched my little girl grow and become the fine young lady who is resilient herself. I know she’s going to be okay. She dreams about teaching Anishinaabemowin to future generations and everyday she teaches me resilience. She teaches me the reasons to go on, she gives me the reason to look forward to watching her grow watching her achieve her goals.”
My mom left me to go to the Spirit World on June 7, 2021. She fought a long and hard battle. I will still always look up to her as the most resilient person I ever knew. My mother will always be the reason why I do what I do, just like I was the reason she fought every day.
About the Author
Tarah-Lynn Remillard (Pichikwe), Mukwa Doodem, is from Dokis First Nation. She is 22 and enrolled in the Indigenous Studies program at Nipissing University. Tarah-Lynn hopes one day to be a teacher of Anishinaabemowin. She enjoys doing beadwork, but struggles with it some days since being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. She shares her thoughts about the passing of her mom last year to cancer and resilience.