On mothers and nurses as heroes Gail Kaufman, a nurse at 19. This Mothers’ Day will be my third without my mother and come shortly before the third anniversary of her death. Thinking about the fact that I will never see her face and cannot make a simple phone call to hear her voice is still emotional for me. My mom was my hero. She also was a nurse. That makes it especially fitting that this Mothers’ Day falls during National Nurses Week. It often does. To understand what is extraordinary about Mom being a nurse is to understand the context of the time and place when she went to nursing school. Mom originally went to nursing school right after high school. However, she didn’t become a registered nurse till many years later.