“Instead of planning a funeral, I was planning a wedding.”
Libby Peck was in dire enough straights in 2000 she had considered starting to plan her funeral.
She had just been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer. She had been given six months to live. Yet she was thinking of the new man in her life, Leroy Peck.
“The more I read, the sadder I became,” Peck said on Monday at the kickoff social for the Carthage Relay for Life. “All I could think of was poor Leroy. Here I am stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer. You can imagine I had decided to have a heart to heart talk to him. I told him I didn’t think he should go through this again and we should probably go our separate ways. Being the kind man that he is, and I’ll never forget his words, he said ‘Libby, this is only a bump in the road and I will stay by your side forever. We will spend our lives together and however long that ends up being is up to God.’ If you don’t think the tears didn’t flow, I could cry right now telling you about it.
“Instead of planning a funeral, I started planning a wedding.”
The Carthage Relay for Life isn’t until warmer days June 5 and 6, but more than 65 people, representing a number of businesses and groups in and around Carthage gathered in the winter chill of January to start to work on their chore — raising money for the American Cancer Society.
The teams heard from the 10-member planning committee, many of whom are cancer survivors, about the new wrinkles in this year’s Relay for Life and other things they needed to know for their six-month endeavor.
Kathy Hill, chairwoman of the Relay planning committee said the money they raise goes to fund research into cancer treatments and cures, but it goes into much more, including counseling for everything from helping people quit smoking and to helping people diagnosed with cancer deal with the traumatic news.
It goes to help people who are fighting cancer get to their treatments in far away places such as St. Louis or Houston, Tex. It may go to help someone battling cancer buy something they need in that fight.
Nora Tibbets, the recorder for the committee, said the committee members are conducting a separate fundraiser to pay the costs of the Relay for Life and make sure all the money raised by the teams goes to the American Cancer Society.
Michael Lackey, the committee’s Web coordinator, showed the teams the new features on the Relay’s Web site, including a list of business that have already been asked to be corporate sponsors.
On the Web
More details about the Carthage Relay for Life can be found on the Internet at http://carthagerelay.org/
