Former Democratic U.S. Rep. Nita Lowey has died at the age of 87. Lowey’s family says in a statement that she died Saturday after battling metastatic breast cancer.

Nita M. Lowey, a veteran legislator from New York who served 16 terms until her retirement at the end of the 116th Congress, died on Saturday. The cause was breast cancer, her family announced. She was 87.

Nita M. Lowey, a liberal New York Democrat who won a seat in Congress in her early 50s and rose over 16 terms to one of the top positions on Capitol Hill as the first female chair of the House Appropriations Committee,