Hi and welcome to life, death, and the space between podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Amy Robbins, and I'm a licensed clinical psychologist in Medium.

On this podcast, we explore life, death, consciousness, and what it all means.

Today, we have a story from one of our listeners,

Karen. This is a ghost story about her mom's connection to her even after she passed.

In 1970, when my mom was 38, I was 11. She was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a radical mastectomy of her left breast. Breast cancer in 1970 wasn't really talked about the way things

are today. They didn't do reconstruction surgery the way they do today. It was very traumatizing for a

woman back then. This was before Betty Ford had breast cancer and brought it to the forefront,

encouraging women to talk about it. Anyway, my mother and I were very, very close.

She grew up very poor on the lower east side of New York.

Her father was an immigrant and didn't speak English.

She spoke Yiddish until she was old enough to go to school where she learned English.

Her mother died when she was just four years old. Needless to say, she had a

difficult life, but in spite of it all, or maybe because of it, she was an amazing mother to my

older brother and me. She always wanted a daughter so she could have what she never had and longed for, a close,

loving relationship with her mother. My mom never shielded me from the fact that she had breast

cancer, even at the age of 11. She told me exactly what happened, showed me her chest where her

breast was removed, and reassured me that despite what she was going

through, she was not going to die. She would be okay. She didn't want me to be afraid, so she was

very open about what was happening. She was strong on the outside, but scared to death on the inside,

naturally. She told me an interesting story years

later when I was a teenager. She was in the hospital after the surgery, and she had a dream.

...