I'm going to be honest because I'm drunk and this is the internet and no one knows who I am (I hope). But my mom's death.

Before her passing I was an asshole to everyone (Think dr.House without the benefit of always being right). And within a week. I lost my job (called in sick to go snowboarding on my new bosses first day, came in the next day and asked why his breath smelled like burbon), my dad finally got another job worthy of his talents after 5 years of bouncing around (thanks bush recession), and my mom was diagnosed with cancer.

At the time my younger brother was in high school, my dad settling in to a new job, and me taking 3 units at community college at night. I was nominated to take mom to her chemo appointments and generally take care of her during the week.

So a strange thing happened at this time, I started to consider the people around me. I think it was the nurses in the oncology wing, I saw the compassion they had for their patients. The idea that people other than me had problems of their own, took root in my thought process. I finally spent some quality time with my mom for the first time as an adult. We watched movies in the afternoons, I remember watching the big lebowski (she really liked "oh brother where art thou" and I told her it was by the same directors) and Fubar We really liked the latter, her favorite part was when spoiler: deaner's hair fell out but his moustache didn't.

So when my dad and brother got home at the end of the day, I left to go drink... heavily. My friends were great, if I didn't want to talk about it, no one asked. If I did, I was listened to. People I had been horrible to in the past put aside their dislike for me and offered their ears.

One day in the fall, September I think, she felt especially bad and my dad rushed her to the hospital. I was passed out in an alley behind a supermarket in long beach. I arrived at the hospital just in time for a young doctor to deliver the latest test results. To this day I'm sure that was his first time telling someone that they were going to die. This guy made an analogy about her abdominal scan looking like a "shotgun blast" and that chemo obviously wasn't working. At this point everyone else left the room for some reason and my mom made it a point to tell me, "i know how you get, but i want you to promise not to get sad or angry and do all those things I wanted for you". I got home that night I cried even harder than when we finished where the red fern grows (we took turns reading each other chapters when I was in elementary school). She came home, was put on heavy pain killers an was gone within two weeks. The day after I went out surfing alone. For the first time in almost a year I was to actually breathe. Out there in the lineup I took a vow of pacifism, and made a mental note of all the people around me that I had treated badly. I'm still far from perfect and I can be rude and sarcastic at times, but I am ten times the man I was 6 years ago.

Tldr: I'm a better person because my watched my mom battle cancer.