well good morning good afternoon good evening to pin a whatever time you might be watching this television show this is the bishop dr sydney l gangs coming before you once again to live well and i'm still kickin and yes you on the focus of the whole show yet and today we we have a very small best to show tonight all this morning all this afternoon whatever time you watch and it's you know usually on the place yeah well we just want to thank you for the opportunity today months ago we sat here and because we were the one that was being interviewed and all along well we will sitting here i think i heard my wife say one point you know what we need to interview you and that way are we here we are here we like to say that well first i just want to say hello to everyone of course that by now everybody know i'm that often that great book on the market we want to hear her story we are here for her i know we've been missing her a little bit but we thank god that she's back so i just want to talk to you for a few minutes anita what's been go on go on with you since the last time well one of the things that i did i went back and review my sort of values ok i always thought ah by telling people take a look at the sort of values and the one that really resonated with me having gone through this your and your family and your community and things like that so i just had a probably one of the most trying experiences of my life was in dealing with my mother my mother recently passed away on september thirteenth of exactly seven thirty two ok and that was an incredible journey for me i was not prepare for it i had no idea how ill she was right and things like that and so that whole entire experience of getting to the point where i was understanding what was going on she was stage four her cancer had metastasized and there was a lot of just a lot of information to absorb at one time so you know you have the intellect but then you have this emotion all this emotion is was going on inside of me at the same time as i'm trying to understand what exactly is going on so but one of the things that sort of caused me to think about the word legacy is as i'm watching my mother and she's going through a lot of taking on a little bit more meaning to me they would have before that's good because we know legacy is something that's left behind you have some something that you can look back go in and say well really your family was maybe a everybody and that's a legacy that's been passed on from one generation to the next generation so used to say legacy what type of legacy do you believe from this experience that your mother has left yes so that's a really really interesting question and one of the things that really became apparent to me was there was an individual that was my mother's best friend and this is a person that we never met growing up as a matter of fact we had this kind of joke between my brothers and me like what does she really exist as mommy and really have this friend and all that and it turned out that she did she really when i so i ended up going to pittsburgh in july and i've basically been there for like three and a half months or so again just be a what my mother and everything but during the course of when i was there and michelle you on the front and we met this best friend and she was amazing what she was just this amazing human being and i can see why my mother lie as much as he did so what i had what i did was i reached out to her and asked her if she would if she would have dinner with myself and one of my brothers and she agreed to do that and we basically just sat there and picked our brain asked her questions about our mom and the term that i started using as i was walking through all of this and getting all of this information is that my mother was a warrior she was definitely a warrior not just a warrior from a perspective but from the perspective of caring for other people she's an activist like we do go and up there she was an activist and we used to watch our getting dressed to go out in march in protest we never really got the full welfare rights organization of allegheny county as well as so she always had this focus on the underdog and always this focus on helping other people and helping this group of people over here understand why they should treat this group of people over here better than when they do and so a lot of information about protesting when i look at my mom up online and i actually saw bits and pieces not a lot but i actually saw bits and pieces of information where her name was showing up where she was a part of this community development kind of thing assertion associated with the university of pittsburgh so i'm just saying all of these names and these are things that i wasn't that i wasn't necessarily aware so she gave us a lot of insight and who our mom was from her perspective having worked with her and with her and all of that it was very insightful well to me that sounds like a legacy ready to hear that your mom was community oriented to see that she was involved and that she laid a difference in individuals lives but i just want to go a little deeper with me ok you said that you wasn't prepared for what you was confronted with for somebody does watching that might be experiencing because you were not prepared how did you go about things you weren't prepared so what was your initiative response how did you go about doing certain things but it was definitely a process  wasn't like i was able to walk in and say ok a b c i had to learn what a b c was and then act on a b c as i was kind of going along and there were people who helped me  along the way to understand what was going on like i said my mom was stage four but she was diagnosed in two thousand and fourteen but we didn't know that she was stage four and we just didn't really understand the extent of her illness and you know part of that again and this gets back to her legacy and who she is as a person part of it was she didn't tell us because she didn't want us to worry she didn't want us to be concerned and she didn't want us to be upset or anything like that so she didn't really she really didn't tell us what was going on so the first day or so and we're sitting there and we're having conversations with her medical like at a loss for me i just felt like i was at a loss because i just didn't understand the extent of what my mom had women going to all of this time and we didn't we just weren't aware i know this one is this cancer awareness month because so many people like your family my family i experienced that in april with my sister and like  you we didn't know she had cancer and it was so devastating to us because we had to jump into a mode and we didn't have time to process because it was just like that so it was like you where do we go from here how do we handle it would do we need to do and at the same time we felt like we had to be strong for her and we didn't want her to see us concerned and worried so my question to mom we're here for you tell us about that and that's exactly how we were there were before i go into that there were a couple of instances along the way when she was surrounded by doctors and they were you know she was having a little bit of a crisis or something where i literally just had to leave the room because it was just a motion only it was just overwhelming and i felt quite frankly i felt completely helpless like there is nothing that i can do to help so i basically excuse myself from the room and everything but just trying to grasp what's happening and soldering all of that information and pulling it together most of our worry and concern we did it when we were amongst ourselves when we were together we didn't really show that so much we were just and it might have even now when i look back it might have been a bit overzealous because we were just like we're going to beat this like right you know we're to do whatever it is that needs to be done so that we can be there's mommy you need to eat you need to drink you need to do this we've got to get your weight back so it was almost her cheering section right but again the reason i used the word overzealous is because we still fundamentally fundamentally didn't quite understand how sick our mother was so right my mind it was just a matter of time if she eats well for a week but as i'm trying to encourage her to eat and she my in a day sorry bites of something so it was really rough to kind of just to kind of watch that and everything and when it would get to the point where i hard enough you're not you're you know and then looking at that and hearing myself and then listening to her at other times when she was saying and needed the pain the pain is so bearable so it was just sort of trying to balance out all of these things but also not fall apart right same time and it's ok to feel that anger and anger is not so much because you as manager mother yeah i'm going to my counseling mode it wasn't so much that you was angry with your mother sometimes when you feel hopeless and you just don't know what to do and you're trying to figure it out now mommy i know you can do this but the reality they but because we want yeah and it's ok for us to want because number one we love our families we love our parents and we don't want to see them like that and sometimes we feel hopeless  so we get angry because it's not that i can do so i'm angry so get out mommy get up you need to get up and i know you can do it if you could but the reality is unfortunately that they can't so i want to encourage you not to blame yourself for getting i got angry when my sister was going through and i never mentioned it out loud but i was angry because i couldn't understand why her and sometimes we get selfish because of how we feel right why couldn't be somebody else why did this thing hit my family but it has our families and cancer is is such a serious condition and any family  we are concerned about you we just want what's best for you i'm quite sure your audience now that they're in this they're going to be reaching out to you because you're a good hearted person and we quite sure that will we see we see a lot of your m you're talking about your mother course you talk about also yourself how do you have courage a parent that's going through this what would you encourage them to do that have children like yourself  i would definitely so to answer that question i kind of put myself in my mom's position from the standpoint of how would i want to interact with my kids and i would have definitely told my kids yes and i would have to figure out a way to tell them but at the same time i know and understand that that's also my personality right now wasn't my mom's personality so her withholding that information from her wow it was a little bit upsetting but at the same time my mom was very stoic and my mom and we knew that my mom was very private and we knew that which is why we never met the best friends you know so that's that's how i was that's what my mother was and so on the one hand i can look at it and say that if i were in that situation i would have shared it with my family because i need people around you but my personality is very different from my mom personality my growing up in a lot of things about me very different from the experiences that my mom has so i have to kind of look at it within the right context right you know what i'm saying but just like when my mom's psychologist was explaining to us what was going on the she was actually showing us our my mom's medical history and everything and and one of the things that she said was that she tried to encourage my mom to share that with her kids and everything and  both i mean myself and my two brothers we were kind of feeling the same way that we wish we would have not we would have done more yeah is what it boiled down to we would have been there we would have figured it out we would have you know somehow even though maybe we would have recognized that there wasn't a lot that we could do right i mean we're not medical professionals rightly but just being there to support her and to help her not go through that by herself like i really wouldn't wish that on anybody that they would go through that by themselves as well because one of the things that i saw that changed my mom was when we did start bringing the family around and we started having them come and we started letting everybody know know our mom is really sick she's really sick and we need the family to kind of come together and have things like that and you can see my mom's spirit was uplifted when when the family came came around and more calmly gather to support their that will help the pain oh my god i think so so i think it's very important i think so to tell the parents if you are born through illness or sickness even though i do because i know as a parent we want to protect our children right even when they are grown and have in their twenty's sones we still feel something about us feel we still need to protect our babies but at the same time we have to come to a place where we have to feel comfortable and i think that's where it has to get to where we as parents have to feel comfortable of saying son or daughter this is what's going on with me sometimes i think parents feel they always have to be strong and and i think that we as children to our parents we want them to know we love them we glad that they're strong but there's something wrong let us help right because you did for us give us an opportunity to so back into you and so also you was talking about a book that you were writing that you've been working on specific it was coming up of the heels of another book project that i was involved and that was kind of the spark for me to really think about the fact that you know you have a book inside and you know you really need to start taking these steps towards getting that book getting that book out and so but what was interesting is as i'm going along and i'm writing i would have these these periods of time when i just i just couldn't write like the procrastinating like what what is the deal you know talking about writing this book are your friends here you talk to know my name in the book like what is the deal here i what's going on and this year i had determined that i was going to myself in this situation with my mother and what i came to understand completely after the fact after she passed i could look back and i could see how god was orchestrating every one and the reason i say that were there are lots of reasons why i say that but in relation to the book the reason i say that is because this experience that i had with my mom was literally the last chapter in the book so i had i pushed myself and had i you know tried to meet that deadline and there's this whole entire segment of the story that would not have even been in the book  it's really important that it is because on the front end of the book i'm talking about my sister's death and how god showed up for me in that instance on the back in of the book i'm talking about my mother's passing and how god showed for me in that instance and so those two sort of balance out the book if you will and then anita is everything in between and everything that god has orchestrated in my life to get me to this place where i am right now now that i'm looking back i can see it now i don't necessarily see a before but one of the things that i would share is that there was a point when i was going through this where it was seriously i moved from being in the natural to being in the spiritual like i felt something within myself shift well and it was when we were having a conversation with the doctors and they were telling us your mom really doesn't have a lot of time and all of these and at one point it just hit me there's only two choices either god is miraculously planning to heal her or he's calling her home was so there really wasn't at that point i realize they're there they don't have anything in their arsenal their medical arsenal and all the research and blah blah blah they don't have anything else so we've hit the end of the line in the natural and now we're completely in the realm of the spiritual and i recognize that don't not as verbal e as i'm articulating it around but i recognize that there was a shift inside of me and at that point it was with in like the next two to three hours that my mother actually pa and i know we just don't have the time to go into what you learned but we really thank you for sharing that with us and which audience because so many families are going through this type of situation with the  you what would you like to leave with your already here one of the things that my monster to us when it was a moment when we were all together and it must've been about maybe fifteen of us in her room just someone being her bed and everything and she started talking to us as a family and telling us like all of the things that have caused division and disunity in the family like all of those things from years and years ago we need to just leave that in the past where it is and she specifically said it stops today so i took that as a sort of a mantra that there's some things that we have to do within the family to kind of bring about unity and i see that as  sort of an outcome of my mom's legacy as well wow well we just want to take a moment we so are we time is just gone what but well spent and it's been an honor thank you for allowing us to interview you today we're looking for part two we're looking for the book and we just want to say thank you and thank you for tuning in to a place to soar where you are first that heart and