Never Give Up

Maria is dead, but her spirit is behind this. For this may be the hardest thing I have ever done, voluntarily: Putting my daughter on the Internet! Whenever I think of her and see her smiling eyes looking at me from her picture I seem to hear her say: Never give up!
She never did give up. Only the cancer killed her anyway.
Breast cancer kills more women in the world than any other type of cancer. In this country alone approx. 40.000 women die every year from breast cancer. In 1940 a woman's lifetime risk of getting breast cancer was 1 in 22. Today it is 1 in 7. If you are a woman you have every reason to be afraid.
It is a cancer epidemic out of control. And it is a horrible and painful way to die.
When I was a child there was hardly any crime. A murder was practically unheard of. Today crimes are as common as a cold. Murders are committed all the time.
When I was a child I never knew anybody with breast cancer. It was so rare.
Today there are three women in my little fitness group who have lost a daughter to breast cancer. My closest neighbor has, too.
6 Children were made motherless. Husbands were devastated. Parents would have given their lives to save their daughters. It happens everywhere, all the time. It happens to 40.000 women every year.
Can't we all do something? Even if not much? To put a stop to whatever is causing it?
I have to do something. That is why I am putting my daughter on the Internet! I have written her story: 'Days of Goodbyes'. She fought so bravely that her doctors asked what she was doing, that she wasn't telling them, because she survived much longer than they thought she would.
There is something very wrong in our society when people turn to crime and kill each other. And there is something very wrong, when mankind invent things that poison our environment, our food, our toys, our lives.
That is why I tell Maria's story. It takes passion and it takes money to fight this disease. For these women die one at a time. And they are not mentioned in the media and honored with names and pictures. They are forgotten by the media like the snowflakes of yesteryear. Their families and friends are overcome with grief. The loss of talent is staggering. So many women taken away while they are young, bursting with knowledge, love and energy.
When a campaign is launched later this month to sell 'Days of Goodbyes', every penny that comes in will go to Silent Spring Institute, a model alliance of scientists, physicians and activists dedicated to identifying - and changing - links between the environment and women's health, especially breast cancer. We can all do something.