'I Couldn't Save My Mom, but I Can Help Countless Others'

For two years as Sharla Sieve battled stage 4 colon cancer, she had to drive 230 miles to get lifesaving treatment. Her teen daughter Olivia vowed to change that

- ALEX ROSS

Olivia Sieve remembers with stark clarity that November 2022 Friday afternoon when she and her siblings were called to the living room for a “family meeting” by their mother, Sharla. A sinking feeling of dread grew with each step she took down the stairs.

It had been nearly two years since Sharla, 49, was diagnosed with colon cancer, and family meetings no longer meant good news. Olivia, 15, sat on the sofa in their Lynnfield, Mass., home, surrounded by her four siblings—Alex, 19, Ben, 18, Maddie, 17, and Mitchell, 13—as Sharla calmly told her children she only had weeks left to live. “I was breaking down to the point where I thought I was going to throw up,” Olivia recalls. “But the one thing I’ll never forget was my mom holding me—and telling me that she knew I’d be okay.”

Every two weeks for 13 months, Olivia had watched her mom and her mom’s best friend, Jocelyn Gentile, pull out of the Sieve family driveway to begin the 230-mile trek to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City—the closest hospital where Sharla could get the best treatment for her stage 4, metastatic colorectal cancer. “Just thinking about the drives home could make me cry,” recalls Gentile, 56. “It was five hours in traffic. She was sick, and we’d have to stop. It was absolutely horrific.”