For Eva.

In Amy's words

In 1996, my mother was diagnosed with advanced endometrial cancer. Six months later, she was gone. She was fifty-three. I was twenty-two.

In the final six weeks of her illness, I left my career and came home to care for her. I learned the geography of a hospital room, the cruelty of a clock that moves too fast and too slow at once. When she died, I did not simply lose a mother. I became, almost overnight, the person holding a family together.

A daughter lost her mother. Sons lost their emotional center. A husband lost his partner. A family lost its sun.

My father had relied on her for the daily architecture of his life. My brothers carried their grief in a silence they had never been given the language to name. Everyone was standing in the same house, and yet each of us was somewhere else entirely, alone inside the same loss.

Eva's death was not only a medical tragedy. It was a family rupture. And in the years since, I have come to understand that the two are never really separate.

What I kept asking

For a long time I asked the questions grief asks: Why her? Why so fast? But eventually a different question took hold, and it would not let go: Why was there nothing to catch it sooner?

For cervical cancer, the Pap smear made early detection ordinary, something women simply expect. For endometrial cancer, the most common gynecologic cancer in the country, there is still no such expectation. Detection too often waits for symptoms. And symptoms, as my family learned, can arrive late.

This Foundation is what I built from that question, and from that loss.

It is named for Eva because she is the reason. But it is built for the women who are still here, and for everyone who loves them, so that fewer families have to learn what mine did, the way mine did.

Amy Tucci, Founder