It’s That Time of Year . . . Have You Done This?

Thursday, October 26th, 2017     by Debra DuPree Williams     Start the Conversation


by Debra DuPree Williams @DDuPreeWilliams

Here it is, already past the mid-point mark of October and I am just now thinking about October being Breast Cancer Awareness Month. With the stories I know of family and friends who have walked this dark road, you would think I’d remember. But, life took over, I got busy . . . and I simply forgot.

My sister Bobbie was diagnosed with breast cancer in December of 2015. My husband and I were sitting in the Fatz restaurant in Candler, North Carolina, when I got the call from her. I had to leave the restaurant, I was crying so hard.

Cancer is the one word that most of us dread hearing. It invades our bodies and our lives, and the lives of our loved ones, unlike anything else on the face of the earth. It’s an ugly word.

But, since our family members are followers of Christ, we all began to pray for my sister. I put her on every prayer chain I could find. In fact, many of you prayed for her. I cannot begin to tell you how very thankful we are for every single utterance of her name.


Praying and Believing
I’m going to get fairly personal here. That’s what cancer does. It makes everything personal. I was so upset, I couldn’t even stay in the same room with my husband at night because I was up almost all night, every night, crying and praying for my beloved sister.

I cried, and I prayed, and I wrote messages to God in the margins of my Bible. God, please hear my prayer. Please heal my Sissy. If I wasn’t crying or praying, I was praising God and singing. I sang all the songs Sis and I had sung together when we were children. I sang, “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus”, “Amazing Grace”, “Not My Will”, “Whispering Hope”, and just about every hymn I could recall. For months, I lay in our guest room, night after night, doing this.

But we never gave up the hope, the faith that God would lay His healing hands upon my precious sister, Julian’s beloved, wife, Gray’s and Melanie’s precious mother, MiMi to Brit, Quinton, Jeret, Micah, Hannah, Rachel, Bruce, and Peter, and to their children. We prayed fervently, we prayed expectantly.

While we prayed, Bobbie fought. She endured months of four different chemo meds. She continued with Herceptin until December 29, 2016, the day she rang the bell. The chemo was followed by radiation every week-day for forty days. She lost her hair and her skin was burned very badly from the radiation. But she never complained. Ever. In fact, as she was enduring the radiation treatments, she hummed hymns. Likely, some of the ones I had sung in the middle of the night.

At her last PET scan, just after Christmas 2016, she was declared CANCER FREE! All praise be to God! She is doing well today, but things could have been a lot different. You see, she was diagnosed as stage 4 . . . terminal. Yet she was cancer free.
Our Beloved Cousin’s  Journey
Our first cousin, Carol’s journey was quite different. Carol was the youngest of three daughters born to our father’s twin brother.  She discovered a lump at age forty. As a single woman, she deeply feared losing her health insurance. Those fears drove her to continue working while going through a four-year battle that involved ten different chemotherapies, none of which was successful.

On November 29, 1999, Carol lost her battle with cancer. She was forty-four years old. Carol expressed to her parents her deep desire to do something for children. Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill decided to donate the bulk of Carol’s estate to Princeton Theological Seminary, Uncle Bill’s Alma Mater. This generous and heart-felt donation resulted in the creation of the Carol Gray Dupree Center for Children.


To those of you who have lost loved ones to this horrible disease, my heart aches for you. I wish your story could have ended like Bobbie’s. We don’t understand God’s ways. We aren’t supposed to understand everything here on earth.

It is my personal belief that death is the ultimate healing, for in death, we are with God in a new, heavenly body, in the presence of Christ, our Savior. I know that Carol is in Heaven with Jesus.  

This post is my way of encouraging you to please get your mammogram. Have you had yours this year? If you are a male reading this, ask this of the women in your life. Encourage them to make that appointment today!

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It’s That Time of Year-Have You Done This? @DDuPreeWilliams



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