Tony Rossi
In early 2023, when author Lisa Hendey should have been celebrating the publication of her latest children’s book, she was met with troubling news: a diagnosis of stage 3 breast cancer. The following months brought both physically draining treatment and spiritual support. With the worst now behind her, Lisa is promoting her book about caring for God’s creation, titled “I Am Earth’s Keeper,” as well as sharing her cancer journey.
After a bout with breast cancer 15 years ago, Lisa has been devoted to self-exams every month. While doing one recently, she didn’t feel any lumps, but something looked amiss. Her instincts told her to check things out, even though she wasn’t due for a mammogram for several months. The mammogram didn’t reveal any problems, but an MRI did: invasive lobular cancer, which spreads on a cellular level. “By the point that we intervened,” Lisa told me, “it was quite large, and I ended up having a double mastectomy, reconstruction, and radiation...So it was really good that I listened to my gut on this.”
Lisa’s recovery was painful and slow. She will take medication for the next five years. Thankfully, she had tremendous support throughout her ordeal, support which included the Paulist priests at her Los Angeles parish providing her with Anointing of the Sick, Confession, and prayers. Lisa added, “One of the most beautiful spiritual moments following surgery was to have my husband [Greg]…[bring] the Eucharist home to me. He was commissioned as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion. I cried big, fat, happy tears to have my husband bring me the body of Christ.”
There were times Lisa could barely muster the strength to pray. But she felt the intercessory prayers of others giving her strength. And when she was able to pray herself, the rosary was her choice. Lisa said, “If you’re undergoing the kind of radiation treatment that I had…every day you’re in the same place surrounded by people who are very ill...I decided…to use that time praying for my fellow patients. I started praying what I would call a ‘waiting rosary.’ I would count 10 heads in the waiting room and intentionally try to…pray in that moment for their intentions.”
With the hardest parts of treatment behind her, Lisa is focused on “I Am Earth’s Keeper,” which was illustrated by Giuliano Ferri. It finds its inspiration in St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon,” Pope Francis’s call to care for God’s creation, and a photo taken by Lisa’s friend in Mississippi. “One morning, [he] was out on the pond near his house,” she said. “It was at sunrise, he took this beautiful photo where the sun or the sky was reflected in the stillness of the water...He shared it on Facebook and said, is the sky up or down? Something about that photo and the majesty of that moment jumped into my heart. That day, I sat and wrote the poem that would eventually become this book.”
Everything she has endured this past year instilled Lisa with a deeper appreciation for St. Francis’s view of the world. She concluded, “St. Francis...reminds us that the natural creation around us is not just put there for us to use at our will, but that we’re called to live in union with everything around us. One of the gifts of being called to slow down because of illness is that it caused me to stop and see the little details that, perhaps in my haste, I may have been missing.”
For free copies of the Christopher News Note GOD IS MY STRENGTH, write: The Christophers, 5 Hanover Square, New York, NY 10004; or e-mail: mail@christophers.org