What happened to Kamala Harris’ mother?

If there were one single woman whom Kamala Harris had to thank most for pushing her along the illustrious career path she has trod, it would be her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan.

Gopalan, the oldest of four children, was born in southern India. At nineteen, she graduated from Delhi University and applied to a graduate program at Berkeley. In 1958, the young Indian woman left her home country for a faraway one she had never been to as she set her mind on becoming a breast cancer researcher and working on finding a cure.

Shyamala was supposed to return to India after graduating as she had an arranged marriage waiting for her. However, falling in love with Kamala’s father, Donald J. Harris, fueled her decision not to leave the U.S. The year Kamala was born, her mother was awarded her PhD.

In her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold, Harris wrote: “Her marriage—and her decision to stay in the United States— were the ultimate acts of self-determination and love.”

Harris described her mother as being attuned to political matters and issues. According to her book, Gopalan was “conscious of history, conscious of struggle, conscious of inequities,” and “born with a sense of justice imprinted on her soul,” traits the Democratic nominee evidently inherited.

As her sister, Maya Harris, wrote in a 2020 post on X:

Here’s what we know about the final years of the woman who left such a consequential mark on the current VP – and perhaps, future President of the United States.

A woman of strength and conviction

In her book, Kamala Harris recalled how her mother would tell her children: “Fight systems in a way that causes them to be fairer, and don’t be limited by what has always been.” This noble belief seems to have stayed with the prosecutor until today.

Knowing how close Harris was to her mother, and how meaningful of an impact being raised by Gopalan had in her life, it isn’t hard to believe, as she relays in the video above, that learning her mother had cancer was “one of the hardest days of [her] life.”

It was 2008, at a restaurant where her mother had asked Kamala and her sister to meet for lunch. Shyamala reached out to her daughters from across the table and told them she had been diagnosed with colon cancer.

In The Truths We Hold, Harris described the “grim routine” of driving her mother to the hospital for chemotherapy. Anyone who knows someone who has undergone cancer treatments knows how tough on the mind and body it can be, and watching a loved one go through the grueling process can break one’s heart. Understandably, Harris wrote that the routine felt “overwhelming” at times.

Her mother’s condition would end up worsening. “Cancer—the disease she’d devoted her life to defeating—was now wreaking its havoc on her,” Harris wrote. At some point, she started feeling “anticipatory grief” for the loss that was to come.

Before passing, Shyamala wanted to go to India. Harris went as far as booking the plane tickets even though her mother was in hospice care by then. Although she would not get to go back to her home country, she managed to see her brother, Kamala and Maya’s uncle, who came from Delhi to see her. Gopalan passed away the next morning.

Harris closes chapter seven of her memoir by writing:

“One of the last questions she asked the hospice nurse, the last concern on her mind, was “Are my daughters going to be okay?” She was focused on being our mother until the very end.

And though I miss her every day, I carry her with me wherever I go. I think of her all the time. Sometimes I look up and talk to her. I love her so much. And there is no title or honor on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’s daughter. That is the truth I hold dearest of all.”

Shyamala Gopalan died from cancer on Feb. 11, 2009.