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.

What it made me

Watching her illness taught me something at twenty-two that I have never let go of: no one will guard your health as fiercely as you can guard it yourself. So I started paying attention to my own body the way I wish someone had been able to pay attention to hers. I learned my patterns. I noticed what was normal for me and what was not. I asked questions, and when an answer did not sit right, I asked again. I never handed my wellbeing to someone else and walked away.

I trust experts. I also trust myself. I have never believed those two things have to be opposites. That is the muscle I want every woman to build, and it is the practical heart of this work. Not fear. Attention. Here is what I want every woman to know.

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

For the next generation

The grandsons she never met.

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I have three sons. They will never know their grandmother. They know her the way you know someone from photographs and the stories I keep telling: her laugh secondhand, her warmth described but never felt.

Eva would have adored them, and they would have been wrapped up in her completely. Instead there is a space at the table where she should be. Every time I look at my boys, I see both what she gave me and what she never got to give them.

And they want to be part of telling her story. They ask about her, they carry her name, and they want to help. In that, they are learning what I wish every boy could learn early: that caring for the women you love is not something to do from the sidelines. The husbands, the fathers, the sons, and the brothers who ask the hard questions and refuse to look away, that is how we change what happened to my mother. My boys are starting early. I hope yours will too.

That absence is what this foundation is fighting. Not an abstraction. A grandmother her grandsons never met, and all the grandmothers other children still could.