Normani is an open book as she prepares for a major comeback. In a recent promotion with Bose, the entertainer revealed her father was diagnosed with cancer just a year after her mother fought through chemotherapy treatments due to breast cancer.
“(When my mom was going through chemo), the thing that really kept her going was getting on FaceTime and being like, ‘How are the sessions going,'” the former Fifth Harmony member told Bose. “She’s always so eager to hear the new records we’ve been working on.”
She continued, “And then a year later when my dad ended up being diagnosed he would say mid-treatment, ‘I’m ready for you to take over the world.'” The 27-year-old singer also mentioned how music has been her family’s “safe haven.”
Last fall, Blavity-U covered how the “Wild Side” singer felt helpless watching her mom go through two battles with breast cancer. Both times, her mother, Andrea Hamilton, detected lumps in her breasts through a self-exam. In an op-ed with Elle, she said her mother’s diagnosis taught her that “early detection and not taking anything for granted are so important.”
Normani was only 5 years old when her mother was first diagnosed with breast cancer. She recalled the emotional ordeal of discovering her mother had cancer again 19 years later. “I was in Los Angeles when I found out my mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer again. My family was back in Houston,” she recounted in her Elle op-ed. “I felt incredibly helpless because I wasn’t able to cure her. I could not change the circumstances.”
Normani concluded by stating that her mother was in remission and how watching her mothers’ battle taught her how to “maximize every single moment and prioritize actually living instead of just existing.”
“I know for a fact that I have already experienced the scariest time in my life with the thought of having to exist here without my mom,” she added. “The things that scared me before no longer do.”
We’re wishing Normani’s father nothing but the best!