The Pittsburgh of the 1980s was in major economic decline. What had been a vibrant city became a ghost town after 5:00, with those who maintained jobs fleeing to the suburbs once their offices closed. The population shrank, neighborhoods shuttered, and for young people, “opportunity” meant moving away.

When I was just a toddler, my mom started a catering business. She likes to say that her friends at the YWCA teased her into it, and before her first gig she and my dad ate beef Wellington every night for a week so she could be sure the puffed pastry would come out right. By the 1980s she had a solidly established business with a varied portfolio — weddings, upscale boxed lunches for office meetings, brunch for teacher trainings, dinner parties at private homes. Maintaining a diverse set of customers and not specializing kept her business alive during the economic downturn. In some of the worst years her business declined, but it was an across-the-board decrease rather than the loss of her entire livelihood. Her business supported our family for many years, and her flexibility and adaptability kept us going.

Jogging also became a thing in the 1980s, and my dad developed an interest in trying some road races. My mom recalled her own mother being a “golf widow” and decided that, despite never having done an athletic thing in her life, she wasn’t getting left at home. Little did she know, she was built on the perfect long-distance runner’s chassis, and she took to races naturally. She started with 5ks but very quickly targeted the Pittsburgh Great Race, a 10k.

When Pittsburgh started its marathon, Mom was in. She ran it four times, ringing in times just barely over 4 hours (she really ran the marathon!). Each year she would set a new goal time, and I think that goal-setting and interest she showed toward new PRs caused me to internalize the inherent joy of getting better, faster, stronger. There were a couple years where catering was so busy that she could not log the same number of training miles, and she would acknowledge that a PR that year probably wasn’t possible, teaching me yet another important concept: Consistent work matters to achieving your goals.

I would run with her and my dad fairly regularly and did all the races with them. As I got into high school, I had a cross country team to run on and learned a bit about running and competition. For instance, I knew that changing your gait — slowing down to stay with a teammate — was actually pretty exhausting. So when I met her at the halfway point of her first marathon and realized that she was hanging back to keep a male neighbor company, my inner Empress emerged.

 “Mom, do you want to finish this race?” I asked her asked her as she had cut her speed.

 “Well, yeah,” she replied as she bounced along.

 “Then leave him. And run your own race!” My 15-year-old self replied. Apparently my interest in helping her to be successful overrode the constraints of gendered politeness.

A little more than 15 years ago, my mom was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). Ironically, her diagnosis came when she tried to donate platelets to a friend who was suffering from a different type of leukemia. If you have to get cancer, CLL is not the worst choice. It works slowly, but she lives knowing that her CLL could at any time mutate into a more virulent form of leukemia, which would mean a six-month death sentence.

One good thing about having toughed life out in Pittsburgh was that my mom had connected with best-in-class oncology. Her health goes in cycles now — it is best when she starts a new treatment, but as the cancer cells adapt, her health declines until she is able to change protocols. A few times now, we’ve had to wait for a new treatment to be approved by the FDA before she can get back on track.

Throughout her entire experience with CLL, my mom has remained extremely active. She kept running and going to the YMCA for classes. She didn’t always feel great — some of the chemo treatments came with the expected side effects, like nausea. But she derived a lot of happiness and satisfaction from staying active, and she did not want to give up being an athlete because of cancer. Being strong and healthy had been part of her identity for years. Physical strength and endurance was one of the pillars for her ability to be resilient and confident. Even if she was up against a challenge or something unpredictable in her business, she knew she had the physical strength to get the job done. She’d pick up and move boxes that looked twice her size to get ready to transport food to the party she was catering, and she could hang in there for hours on her feet to make sure everything got done that needed to be ready for a party. After years of pursuing her running goals no matter how much the catering business demanded, she was not going to let cancer take her out of her exercise regime. She firmly believed the activity helped to keep some of the treatment side effects at bay, and she just wasn’t interested in becoming an invalid. She missed the memo — no, she tore up the memo — that when you get cancer you are supposed to rest, hide from life, and give up on your goals.

My mom’s enthusiasm for her gym classes was infectious to her gym buddies. They all knew she had CLL, and as her health became more challenged — she had a terrible cough for several years — they understood and supported her. Her positive attitude, bouncy enthusiasm, and determination to do as much as she could really resonated with them.

About two years ago her health was really in decline. She had to stop running and going to classes — the cough just wouldn’t permit it. She’d see her gym buddies sometimes in the park when she was walking her dog, and they’d tell her that they were saving her spot in class. No one would dare to use Linda’s spot.

By early 2018, things were looking pretty dire. She was in and out of the hospital, and her workouts were replaced with napping during inexplicable bouts of fever. I started looking for opportunities to send her encouraging words from other athletes to remind her that she was still very much a part of an athletic community. I started posting #heymomcrushcancer messages on Instagram with videos of groups of people at the gym yelling “Hey Mom!” including an entire pack of women at an Iron Sisters camp.

Then things took a really bad turn. In February 2018 she was back in the hospital and in a tremendous amount of pain. I was on a work trip in St. Louis, and I felt like my heart was being carved out of my chest. As soon as I got back, Sam and I headed up to Pittsburgh from D.C., where we had been living for years. Mom got out of the hospital but was still in bad shape, and the big, ugly questions reared their vile heads: Had her CLL mutated? Was she about to die? Was I about to lose my amazing mother?

Over those few days that I was back in town she started to feel a little better, and despite continued pain, fever, and general discomfort, her indefatigable attitude was breaking through in big ways. As a caterer, one of her loves was “industrial spying” — going to new restaurants to see what other chefs were coming up with and getting to enjoy someone else’s cuisine (not to mention not having to do any clean-up). As we got closer to getting the results, which would either put her back in the hospital for some immediate and gruesome treatment or would keep her out of health-jail with a plan for a new treatment, my mom declared that if she got good news, we were going to one of her favorite restaurants that night.

That afternoon, my parents, Sam, and I trundled to the Hillman Cancer Center and got comfortable in an exam room, pens and pads at the ready to take notes on a new protocol. Mom was in good spirits, and despite our anxiety over the coming news, we all started cracking jokes and had the giggles. My mom, being tiny, has veins that are difficult to use, and a while ago had a port installed in her chest to allow easier injections and extractions. A nurse arrived, drew some blood from her port, and then withdrew the needle.

“That’s it?” Mom asked.

“That’s all I was told,” the nurse answered, obviously not understanding the question or its implications.

Mom turned to Sam and grabbed his arm. “I’m going to dinner tonight!” she crowed. She had figured out before the rest of us that the nurse would have left needle in if she was going to receive an infusion, which would have meant another stay in the hospital.

By the time her oncologist walked in, our humor had descended into fart jokes, and we were all in tears laughing. The doctor paused in the doorway with a “What the hell is going on in here?” expression. He’s always enjoyed my mom’s incredibly positive attitude, and one can imagine that in a cancer treatment facility it’s not common for there to be much happiness and giggling coming from an exam room, especially after my mom had been having such a rough go.

We did indeed get good news that her CLL had not mutated into a death sentence, and her doctor was again bemused when we all yelled “We’re going to Tessaro’s!”

Mom is on a new protocol now and is healthier than she has been in years. Her cough is gone, and after thinking that her running days were behind her, she’s actually going out for short runs through her favorite park. She’s back to being busy, making thousands of cookies and thousands more plans to check out new restaurants and cater her own fundraisers.

Running, strength, health, and striving for new PRs have been central to my mom’s identity. I always worried how having CLL would challenge that for her. Instead of accepting a new identity as being an invalid and cancer patient, my mom has incorporated that as a new challenge. How active can she remain despite a health handicap? How much of what she enjoys doing can she continue to incorporate in her life? She’s accepted and even embraced that sometimes she just needs to rest without being bitter or angry about it, but whenever she has the opportunity to return to the things she really loves — especially physical activity — she does it.

Her flexibility, adaptability, and consistency in returning to always find ways of including as much of what she enjoys into her life are inspiring to me and to many people who encounter her.

Happy Mother’s Day to the original Iron Empress!