This Mother’s Day, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R) shared a deeply personal reflection on the woman who shaped his understanding of strength through her quiet, painful fight against cancer.
Speaking recently at The Woodlands Christian Academy, Rep. Crenshaw recounted the near-fatal injury he suffered while serving as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan. An IED blast left him blind for weeks and permanently damaged his vision. But in that darkness, he said, it wasn’t his own pain that dominated his thoughts, it was his mother’s.
“You’re thinking, wow, this is definitely the worst physical thing that’s possibly ever happened to me,” Rep. Crenshaw said. “But you know who’s been through something a lot worse? My mother.”
Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s mother battled breast cancer for five years while raising two young boys. She passed away when he was just 10.
“My mother, at the age I am now — actually, she was slightly younger — with two boys, trying to battle breast cancer for five years,” he said. “And I look back on it and I have to admit to myself that I never heard her complain. I never really heard her engage in any kind of self-pity, about the awfulness of her situation.”
Now a father himself, Crenshaw, said he sees her strength through a new lens. “Leaving [my daughter] behind would be my worst fear and horror,” he said. “And my mother had the same mindset.”
In a post on X, Crenshaw wrote, “I lost my mom when I was 10 after she battled breast cancer for 5 years with bravery and grace. She showed me what fortitude really looks like.”
That grace became a guiding light during his recovery. “As I lived in that darkness, because I was blind for six weeks easily, and it was a miracle I got any vision back at all, I looked back on her and her experience, and that’s what strengthens you,” he said.
Crenshaw ended with a message for anyone facing hardship.
“You’re going to experience hardship, but remind yourself, I’ve been through something harder before, so I can probably deal with this now too. And maybe you haven’t been through something harder before… so here’s another truth, and it’s hard: somebody else in the world… has dealt with something much harder than what you’re dealing with, and they dealt with it with a lot more grace. So, you can too.”
This Mother’s Day, Crenshaw’s story is a powerful reminder: courage doesn’t always wear a uniform, sometimes, it wears the quiet strength of a mother facing the unimaginable.
