When I was ill, I had a small circle of people that knew. I got so much from people. It was truly moving how people were there for me and my family. I’ve always been someone who felt this way, but it was so underscored that just really, what life is about is human connection. I really witnessed firsthand the power of kindness, and it really changed me. Not that I wasn’t a kind person before, not that I didn’t value relationships, but it was really a profound experience being a recipient of that. Ever since I’ve had cancer, really all I’ve wanted is to give back. I think cooking is part of that, giving food to people. And not just making it slapdash, but making an effort and putting something of myself into it. It’s more of an offering that way.
Like many African American women, Ida Jaffe framed her transformation in religious terms: before cancer, “my life was on a fast track of shopping and me. It was all about me. I never took the time to call people. I wasn’t a caller, just talk to people to see how they are or what’s happening in your life. I was never that kind of person. It was all about me.” But “God saw something in me that he wanted to change. He had been telling me to change, and I wouldn’t change, and so he gave me time to think about it and make a change in my life and make it for a good thing. Now I’m able to see and help other people, but before this I wouldn’t have taken the time of day.” When her mother fell ill, Ida was able to help:
I think this was one of the greatest things that came out of me having cancer. My mother was diagnosed with cancer four years after me. I was able to mentor my mother. Even saying it was my mother, I don’t think I would have taken the love, time, and care to actually take care of her. I moved back to Ohio and lived there for two years to take care of my mother. She was diagnosed at ninety years old. I took care of her for two years, and I mentored her through her cancer, and she eventually passed away. I lived there and took care of her. Just to be with her every day and tell her, “This is what you’ll go through, and this is what you’ll experience.” She didn’t have the chemo and radiation because she herself decided against it. She was happy. She was OK with where she was. The cancer had metastasized throughout her body, but yet she was a happy person I think because I was there to say I’d been there, done that: “These are some of the things that you’ll go through.” Had I not had cancer I couldn’t have done that. I tell people that your mother is your trainer through all of your life. You learn the most important lessons from your mother. I had the joy of my mother birthing me, leading me through life, but in the last stages of life, my mother taught me how to die gracefully. That was the biggest lesson for me.
