6
November 10
St. James, Jacobs Prairie
A visiting priest at St. James, Father Nathan Becker, delivered an engaging homily about the afterlife, how our choices on earth can make our conditions like heaven or hell, and how our choices can connect to the afterlife. Fundamentally, he spoke about how we change. Even though we may hear the same gospel every few years, we change so the effect of the story changes. This week was 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14 , about the martyrdom of the Jewish mother and her seven sons. Father Becker connected the readings and the gospel to the overall November liturgical themes of death, judgement, heaven and hell. Just like people who buy a white vehicle and then notice more white vehicles, ever since my terminal diagnosis, I focused on all the mention of the afterlife, the hour of our death, etc. Essentially, Father’s point that we change fit perfectly for me considering that the gospels have not changed, but I saw them with a different lens. Instead of being distracted or connecting the story to work, I now felt some urgency to prepare my soul. I wanted my soul to be fully trained for death, but I was not ready to be faced with that anytime soon. #Ready#NotReady
Relay for Life
As a child I read from a children’s Bible that had colorful and very graphic pictures of the tortured seven Maccabee brothers with limbs chopped off and gushing blood and also the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Though the story is the same, I have changed greatly.
In 2008 my initial diagnosis was invasive ductal carcinoma, estrogen and progesterone positive and HER2 negative. The recurrence in my lymph nodes in 2016 was ductal, estrogen and progesterone negative and Her2 positive. The story was the same: I still had breast cancer, but the subtype changed.
I revisited my initial diagnosis and treatment and read some of a journal I kept where I found an old speech. I had been a speaker at the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life in Paynesville in 2009, where I was able to share my story with all attendees. I shared some of the good, the bad, and the ugly, the things I learned, but most importantly, I discussed some of the ways my diagnosis changed me:
Hi, I’m Linda Liebl, wife of Scott, mom to Mack and Ben, daughter to James and MaryAnn Fasbender, A Paynesville class of ’88 grad. It’s nice to be able to say that in the past tense but I still have moments when I can’t believe I was diagnosed with cancer. My story: It was a dark and stormy night, well it was right before Halloween 2008—talk about scary! I was healthy, seldom had even a cold when I found a little lump, 8 of 10 are benign. Not me. I’m too young, short, healthy, feisty to have cancer. My odds were less than 1% to develop cancer at my age. I had a mammogram and an ultrasound with results delivered later the same day—when my doctor said he would prefer to make a house call to deliver the news, I knew it wasn’t good. A biopsy showed invasive ductal carcinoma. We planned for a lu