As the story has it, one day I headed to the opposite side of the globe – the Flipside. I arrived in Korea February 16th, 2005 and thought I’d do a year, then leave. I was wrong. I stayed, launched my first company, Flipside Fitness, and then opened Korea's largest boxing club, Hulk's Boxing (now called Hulk's Club).

After 11.5yrs in Korea, I then picked up one day and returned to Toronto, Canada. But then I left again.

Now I live in the Philippines where I am the CEO and head coach of Empowered Clubhouse, the Philippines' first and only boxing clubhouse exclusively just for women. I also am the founder of the Lil' Sistas Project, CEO and designer of Slay Gear and Baa Baa Black Sheep .Ph.

Monday, August 24, 2015

It Never Gets Easier, I Miss Her so Much... Monday, August 24

Four years ago everything changed and now every year we "celebrate" this day.  I put quotation marks around celebrate because that's the intentions of today, to celebrate my mom's life, but what always ends up happening is us morning the loss of her and her amazing life that involved us all. 

It still feels so strange to acknowledge that she is gone.  To have someone in your life for so long and then to just not have them.  I know it wasn't a sudden thing, her passing, she fought cancer out for about two years, but it still feels like it was a sudden loss.  I still struggle with wrapping my hear around the fact that she is gone.  She is gone but remains in so much around me, both in the physical and non physical sense.  She is in the hand-sewn quilt she made for me, the yellow paint she insisted we paint the kitchen, and of course all the pictures located through out the house.  She is the stubbornness in who I am, the please and thank yous I say every day, and she is in my giggle.  I don't know who it was but one of my mom's friends once commented that I giggled just like my mom and that has always stuck with me.  Sometimes I feel her in my smile and i  the fact that my dad use to always used to tease us and tell the both of us "not to smile too big".   

Today I met with my father and my brother T-Roy's family.  Together we all headed to the cemetery to visit when four years ago today we laid her body to rest.  We put out a blanket, opened a cooler of food, and then sat down to just spend some time there together -- my dad, my brother and his wife and kids, me, and Mama Bere.

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