It was supposed to be an ordinary lunch, but when Kamala Harris spotted her elegant mother, Shyamala Gopalan, moving through the restaurant, she realised something was different.
Sitting quietly with her sister Maya, the pair watched as their mum made her way towards them with careful, measured steps.
Just minutes later, the US presidential hopeful was given the most shocking news she could have imagined: her mum, a respected breast cancer researcher, had been diagnosed with colon cancer.
“It was awful,” she told the late disability campaigner Ady Barkan in a 2019 interview. “You know, for anyone – and so many of us have had the experience of that first time hearing that there is an illness that will lead to death. My mother, she said to my sister and I, ‘I want to meet you guys for lunch.’ And she showed up at the restaurant, wearing makeup – my mother never wore makeup – and her hair was blowdried. She was dressed up.
“And I looked at my sister, I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And my mother walked to the table, and she took our hands, and she said they’d been diagnosed with colon cancer. That was one of the worst days of my life, truly.”
As Kamala paused to wipe tears from her face, she smiled: “I knew this was going to happen. I was like, ‘I am not gonna tear up’. I promised myself I was not gonna tear up.”
Shyamala – whose work helped advance breast oncology research – was born in what was then Madras in India and met her husband Donald Harris at a meeting of the Afro-American Association at Berkeley in 1962, and they married the following year. They soon welcomed Kamala and her younger sister Maya, and travelled with them to Zambia, Jamaica and India several times during their childhood.
During the course of her work, Kamala’s mother also mentored dozens of budding young scientists, and didn’t slow down until the very disease she was studying got hold of her. Kamala, by then district attorney of San Francisco, was by her side every chance she could take, holding her hand and helping Shyamala through “the misery of chemotherapy”.
Kamala also cooked for her mother, nourishing her through the brutal treatment Shyamala received to tackle her cancer. She brought her mother soft clothes and hats to wear as Shyamala’s long dark hair fell out and her skin turned fragile and thin.
Shyamala died in February 2009, just two months after her 70th birthday. Her body was cremated, and Kamala took her ashes back to India to scatter them in the ocean, near where her mother was born. She has since described how watching Shyamala battle cancer changed her views on healthcare for good.
“I think of the battles she fought, the values she taught me, her commitment to improve health care for us all,” Kamala wrote in 2018. “As I continue the battle for a better health care system, I do so in her name.”
And in 2020, Kamala tweeted: “[My mother] was my inspiration and dedicated her life to finding a cure for breast cancer. I will always fight for public funding for cancer research – too many lives have been cut short.”