My Birthday

    Today is my birthday. As you get older, they’re not really a big deal anymore except maybe for those milestone birthdays. But what I'm reflecting on today is that I am now the same age as my mother was when she passed away 23 years ago at the age of 54. After a 6 year battle with cancer, she had finally succumbed to the disease. It was early Sunday morning on September 13th, 1998, I was working out in the Hamptons finishing up an event. It was my mother’s 54th birthday. My family and I had made plans to celebrate it with her later that day at the hospice care facility in Brooklyn where she had been a patient. My beeper went off at around 2 AM. It was my aunt’s number. I knew right then that my mother had passed away.

My mother in the 1950's