Patricia Rooker

In April of 2022, we got the news no family wants to hear, but we also got something rare alongside it: a fighting chance. Stage 1. Caught early. The kind of diagnosis that comes with cautious hope, with talk of odds and treatment plans and an unreal hope that maybe this will be okay.

By December of 2022, the doctors were confident. Cancer free. They talked about another two to five years — maybe more. We let ourselves believe it. We let ourselves exhale for the first time in months, started imagining what those years might look like, all the ordinary future we thought we'd gotten back. We didn't all get together for Christmas 2025. We did our own things letting mom rest and recover because we thought we had more Christmas's. 

Less than four weeks later, January of 2023, she was gone.

Pancreatic cancer doesn't care about staging, and it doesn't care about good news either. It doesn't care that she did everything right — that the doctor's caught it early, that she fought with everything she had. It took her anyway, and it took her fast. Nine months. That's what we got between the diagnosis and the goodbye.

I'm writing this not because I have the words figured out, but because I don't want the world to only know her as a statistic, another name added to the awareness campaigns and the purple ribbons. I want people to know who she actually was.

Before she was anything else to me, she was my person. The one I called first — with good news, bad news, no news at all, just because. She was my best friend in the truest sense: the one who knew all my worst moments and loved me through them anyway, the one who celebrated my wins like they were her own because, in a way, they were.

She showed me what grit looks like. Not the inspirational-poster kind of grit, but the real kind — the kind that gets up and does the hard thing anyway, day after day, even when it's not easy, even when no one's watching. Working hard. Raising kids. Building a home. She had determination that I've spent my whole life trying to measure up to. She didn't just tell me how to be strong. She showed me, over and over.

No one has ever been in my corner the way she was. She showed up. She remembered the small things. She bragged about me to strangers in a way that used to embarrass me and that I would now give anything to hear again. Whatever I did, she made me feel like it mattered — because to her, it did.

She loved fiercely and she worried constantly — these two were never separate for her. She cared so deeply about everyone in her orbit that it sometimes spilled over into worry, into calling to check in one more time, into wanting to fix things she couldn't fix. I understand now that the worry was just love with nowhere else to go. She tried desperately to be there for everyone — her friends, her kids, anyone who needed her — and more often than not, she managed it.

And then there were the grandkids. Twelve of them. If you'd asked her before, she would have told you she loved her children and her friends with her whole heart — and she did. But nothing prepared any of us for what happened when she became a grandmother. Something in her shifted. Those twelve kids didn't just have a place in her heart; they tan it. She lit up in a different way for them. She was softer, sillier, more delighted. Watching them participate in extra curricular activities. Jumping on the trampoline together. Baking cakes or cookies. Watching her as a grandmother was watching her become, somehow, even more herself.

She was my mother. My best friend. My role model. My biggest fan. And I will spend the rest of my life trying to love the people around me the way she loved us: fiercely, worry and all. 

I want to bring awareness and am raising money to support Pancreatic Cancer research. 

Pancreatic cancer is quiet and it is fast, and it doesn't always give you the time that early detection promises — or the time that "cancer free" promises, either. Even when you catch it early. Even when the doctors tell you two to five years. I want people to know that. 

Let's run/walk together to ensure there is a future where others won't lose their person. 

💜💜💜