Alexis, 17, sat quietly in the passenger seat of her dad’s car. She let her eyes lazily scan, the landscape for wildlife. Then a deer came into view about 200 yards in front of them. “Dad, there’s a deer there!” Alexis said. It was a male deer with sharp sntlers(角) on each side of its head.

As the car moved closer, Alexis saw that the deer’s head was bent toward the ground. Then she heard a scream and saw an arm fly up near the deer’s head. Alexis realized the deer was attacking a woman. Sue, a 44-year-old mother, had been out for her morning run. The deer followed her and edged closer. “I knew I was in trouble,” Sue says. She went to pick up a stick for self-defense, and the deer charged. It lifted her with its antlers and threw her into the air. Sue could feel blood flew down her leg. Within seconds, the deer had pushed her off the road.

When Alexis and her father pulled up, the deer was throwing Sue like a doll. Alexis looked into the woman’s terrified eyes, and before her father had even stopped the car, the teenager jumped quickly out of the car and ran toward the deer. “I was kicking it to get its attention,” she says. Then her father, who had followed his daughter, pushed the deer away from the women.

Alexis helped Sue into the car, and then applied a piece of cloth to Sue’s injured leg. “We’re going to get you to a hospital,” Alexis said. Then she heard her father shout loudly. He had been knocked to the ground. Alexis took hold of a hammer from the car and ran to where her father lay on his back. She beat the deer’s head and neck, but the blows didn’t scare it away. “I was losing faith,” she says. “A couple more strikes, Alexis,” said her father. “You can do it.” Turning the hammer around, Alexis closed her eyes and beat the deer’s neck with all her strength. When she opened her eyes, the deer was running away. Alexis got in the driver’s seat and sped toward the nearest hospital.

After Sue was treated, she tearfully thanked her rescuers. “You expect a teenage girl to get on the phone and call for help,” she says, “not to beat up a deer.”

I keep remembering odd things: the way she loved daffodils, jokes she told at the dinner table, the look in her eyes when she talked about my future. I knew about college before I’d never heard of high school was Mom’s second chance at the degree she never had.

Her parents pushed her too much, too hard, and she always wished she hadn’t let the pressure defeat her. She dropped out of college after one term for marriage and a secretarial job. While she never regretted marrying my father, she always regretted giving up her dream of becoming an accountant. She was determined her eldest daughter would never miss an opportunity.

One of the most extremely special times of my life was Christmas in my second school year, when I played Tiny Tim in a local community theater production of “A Christmas Carol.” Mom delighted in my endless rehearsal stories and spent hours helping me work out ways of disguising my long hair. There’s a line in the show: “And it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” Change the pronouns and that sentence describes Mom perfectly.

She was the one person I could talk to about anything. She was right about so much, so often—much more than I gave her credit for at the time.

I never imagined she wouldn’t be here now. I never thought cancer could strike so quickly, could kill someone so strong and determined in only a year. She’s the one person I couldn’t imagine living without; now, since last January, I’ve had to. Suddenly, I have no one to talk to about meaningless little things, no one whose advice I trust completely to help me with decisions. When I come home from school, I come home to an empty house, troubled by memories of the year she spent here dying. I remember the disastrous Thanksgiving when she was feeling terrible, and our wonderful last Christmas Eve together.

What I feel cheated of is the future we’ll never have.

It was the day after Christmas 33 years ago. My wife gave birth to our first child. We were full of gratitude to have Joseph John Mazzella II, also called JJ, sleeping peacefully in the cradle next to our bed.

We had been on the road showing off our little baby to all of the grandparents and great-grandparents. It had been a busy Christmas and hard on my wife who was still recovering from her operation, Now we were back in our tiny flat trying to get a few extra hours of sleep before starting the day.

Just then I heard JJ stirring in his cradle, I leaned over and picked him up before he started to cry and then carefully stole out into the living room so that my wife could keep sleeping. I picked up a bottle and sat in our rocking chair with JJ in my arms. I rocked quietly and fed him in the living room while he looked up at me with his loving eyes. I spoke softly to him but also felt a little nervous and scared as I watched him. How was I going to take care of him? I was a new father and had no idea what the future had in store for us. I rocked and rocked. But luckily, I had so many elders to help me.

After a few minutes I saw the sun slowly rising in the sky outside my window. The bright light was shining down from the heavens making the freshly fallen snow shine with beauty that touched my soul. As I watched it, my fear escaped and I felt such a sense of peace, harmony, love and joy. The Christmas spirit had entered my heart and I smiled. I knew then that whatever the future would hold, it would be smooth as long as I kept love in my heart. New life is precious and I believed my child would be grateful, too and bring us new sunshine in the future.