My dad died when I was 17. He had heart and other problems. He was a good father, lots of love. But he was affected by it. When he died, mom picked up the reins and raised six boys all on her own.
Mum and Dad died of heart problems, my grandparents died of it, my sister has had mini strokes, my brother has had a heart attack - it's genetic; there's nothing I can do.
I always thought I would die of cancer because my mom and my dad both died of cancer. My dad died of osteocancer, and my mom died of colon cancer.
My dad died when I was three so my mom had to raise four kids on her own, and I think there's a part of me that pulls upon having watched my mom do that our whole lives. She had to make it work.
I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her. My whole life sort of ended when my mom died. I had to remake it again and be a new person in the world without my mom. It was a very primal rebirth, that time after my mom died.
When my father died, I was nine or 10, and my mother was like a dad and a mom to me. She raised me and supported me when I came to the U.S.
I don't believe in regretting - one should try to move on. My mum was good at that. She was deeply in love with my father, and he died when I was nine. She remarried, and her second husband died, too. I saw the grieving process she went through. My mother had this way of moving on. It was a fine trait.
My father grew up in Levittown, L.I., in the first tract housing built for G.I.'s. His dad had stormed the beaches of Omaha and died when my father was very young. My dad had to raise himself, pretty much.
Our father died when we were very young, so our mother raised six kids. We saw the world filtered through her eyes, being a minority woman raising six kids.
After our mom died, her parents (our grandparents) had this big court battle with dad. After six lawyers, two fistfights, and a near fatal attack with a spatula (don't ask), they won the right to keep Sadie with them in England.
I had a non-existent knowledge of Queen Victoria's early years. Like everyone else, I thought of her as an old lady dressed in black. My mom had told me about her, though, that she had a very loving relationship with Albert, that they had lots of kids, and that he died young.
My mom and dad both worked when I was little... My mom, her mom died when she was 11, so she had a rough childhood as well. She put herself through college in three years at the University of Texas - while working a job to pay for it.
I have a strong memory of the day I was told that my father had a weak heart and that he had to go to the hospital. He died when I was nine years old on the same day that Franklin Roosevelt died; it was his 45th birthday.
My father was 91 when he passed away of natural causes, and my mother died aged 88. She had a heart condition and had many heart attacks throughout her life, but she had ten children, so that would have put a strain on her body.
It's a long story, my life, growing up with my dad, my mom when she died, everything. I had bad moments in my life, my dad going to prison, I had nothing, and that's where I got my motivation.
Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose.
I always wanted to be a surgeon, because I had a lot of admiration for my father, who is also a surgeon. I also wanted to be a heart surgeon. That was motivated by the fact that my young aunt, a sister of my dad, died in her early 20s of a correctable heart disease.