Immortality

Today in seminary we had a substitute teacher named Sister Webster. At first she just appeared to be a typical LDS motherly woman, who works in the attendance office at Riverton, coaches powder puff football, and loves to tell stories about her kids. However, as she got into the lesson, she told us this:

"I have cancer. When I was diagnosed, they gave me a 5% chance of living six months. That was in 2000."

It was one of the most stunning, beautiful things I have ever heard. And you could understand why she had beat the odds by such a landslide. She was the most cheerful, kind, upbeat woman you can imagine. She was friendly and funny, and when she started class, she asked the class what made them feel loved, and then shared that it made her feel loved when someone knew and used her name, so she wanted to learn everyone's names. And she did. She did a great job at it.

As she taught the lesson, she shared a lot of poignant stories from her personal life. Her daughter ran away at seventeen for six months, and when she returned, she was pregnant. She had the baby, put it up for adoption, and ran away again. (A week later was when our substitute was diagnosed.) She said that as of now, this daughter currently has another child which she decided to keep but was denied custody of, and also has a problem with bipolarism and drug addiction. Her son once told her that with as many times as the daughter had broken her heart, she should change the locks on the house. But she had responded to her son, "Until God changes the locks on heaven and denies me entrance to his kingdom, she will be welcome in my house."

Beautiful, isn't it?

When she was diagnosed, they meant to remove the tissue from both breasts, which she did not agree with. She explained how when you go into a major surgery, they draw on your body with Sharpie where the plan to cut. So before she went to surgery, she wrote on the breast she did not want them to remove with Sharpie: "Mosiah 13:3"

I'll save you the trouble of looking it up:
"Touch me not, for God shall smite you if ye lay your hands upon me, [...]" (Apparently this is also the dating scripture)

The surgeon was so amused by it that the news spread and all the nurses came to see it for themselves. And it saved that breast.

One day after treatment, in her exhaustion she'd gone home to take a nap. She woke up to find that her son had come home from school and was leaning over her to make sure that she was alive still. She opened her eyes, and a teardrop fell out of his eye into hers, and he said, "Mom, please don't die." She comforted him by telling him, "I think when it's my time to die, God will let me know, and I don't feel that I'm finished here yet."

These are a few of the stories she shared, intermingled with gospel doctrine and personal testimony. It was so beautiful and inspiring and spiritual, and I think by the end of the class all of the girls, if not many of the boys as well, were holding back tears. It was a powerful experience, and it's going to stay with me for a long time.

As far as the title of this post... well, even if Sister Webster has fought her cancer this long, she probably won't live as long and full a life as she'd like. So I feel like by giving her this tribute in my blog, I'm giving her some small sense of immortality. Very, very small, but at least I can do my part that way.