Giving Back

As a three time breast cancer survivor, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my legacy.  I started thinking about it during my first battle with cancer in 1996.  Like many of us, the thoughts around how we will be remembered when we are gone crossed my mind on occasion, but for some reason got buried by issues of daily life.  However, also like many of us, my diagnosis brought it to the forefront.

Being the top sales person at the company I worked for was top of mind before my diagnosis.  After my diagnosis, I found a way to be okay with being just good enough to get by.  Working 12-14 hours a day to have a chance at climbing the corporate ladder, gave way to 8 hour days to spend time with my family.

For many of us who have faced their own mortality, we are the fortunate ones.  Life is short, and we are the ones lucky enough to know it.  We get it.  What we’ve been able to take casually before becomes urgent.  Things that were urgent no longer matter.  Life and death is a fact, not a notion.

The question I asked myself is how do I want to be remembered when I die.  What do I want people to remember about me?  A really great exercise that helped me was to write my own eulogy.  When I first co-founded Breast Friends with my friend Sharon Henifin, we attended a class called, “Now is My Time.”  In the class, we had to pretend we were already successful with our vision, our dream.  We had to create a plan and pretend we were already there.  Part of that plan was to write our own eulogy, not how people would remember us based on our current circumstances, but how we would want them to remember us if life were perfect, if we were perfect.

It was quite eye opening, but it gave us both a chance to recognize the kind of women we wanted to be, and to begin to work toward it.

After my second diagnosis in 2004, I knew that I had to leave my job.  Just prior to that diagnosis, while playing the waiting game with the lab, I told my youngest son, who was 19 years old, that the good news was if I had breast cancer again, I could take time off from work.

He said, “That’s little telling Mom, don’t you think.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

He responded with, “You’d rather have breast cancer, than go to work.”

He was right, and I was horrified.  I began making an exit strategy, and finally one year later, I walked away and have never looked back.  I now spend my days helping other women with cancer through the work we do at Breast Friends.   I’ve never been happier even though I was diagnosed yet again in 2009.

The best way I have found to survive a trauma like cancer is to help someone else survive theirs.  We all have different things we have experienced through our personal journey and you never know who you can touch and in what way by being willing to share your story.  If you are interested in giving back to others, you will find healing for yourself.  You will be blessed in ways you cannot imagine.

by Becky Olson, Author, Speaker, and Co-Founder of Breast Friends.