By Lindsey Konkel
On Thanksgiving Day 2011, Court Simmons threw on a pair of shorts and jogged toward the hospice center where her mother, Crystal, was a patient. The energetic 16-year-old loved to cook and had just finished making turkey dinner for her favorite person—her little brother, Reginald, who was 14. As Court (short for Courtney) ran down the street toward the hospice center, a few blocks away from her Philadelphia home, a throbbing ache beneath her left kneecap forced her to slow her pace to a walk. “I was dealing with a lot, so I ignored the pain. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” she says.
Since Court was 9 years old, she had watched her mom, a single parent, deal with a soft tissue sarcoma, a type of cancer that develops in tissue such as muscle or fat. The experience forced Court to grow up fast. When she was 12, her older sister, Christina, who was 17 at the time, died of a brain tumor. And Court was just 16 when her mother died on Christmas Day 2011, at the age of 41.
No comments:
Post a Comment