Rebecca Holder
Author of the memoir You Can’t Grind an Axe on Butter, a story of survival, family, faith, and the simple parental wisdom that anchors you when your entire world fractures.
Author | Educational Leader | Survivor
Holder
The Book
The wisdom woven through this book started long before my own storm hit. It came from my parents, who raised me on an East Alabama dairy farm with faith, family, common sense, and a steady stream of unique parental wisdom.
I didn’t truly appreciate their colorful sayings until life gave me a reason to. Those sayings we called "isms" became my anchor, and ultimately, the very foundation of this book.
Pull up a chair, grab a glass of sweet tea, and discover the thirty-year journey behind the story.
Book Blurb
A Thirty-Year Contract with Survival
On April 20, 1995, my life fractured. I was twenty-nine years old, holding a newborn, and diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin lymphoma. I entered treatment at a hinge point in oncology, benefiting from therapies that were changing what survival could look like.
But my story didn’t end when remission began. The treatments that saved my life kept their own receipts, and decades later I began living with the consequences of the medicine that gave me a future.
The Armor of Simple Wisdom
To survive a road that long, I leaned on the Christian faith and plainspoken “isms” I had been given long before I knew I would need them.
At the heart of this memoir is a question that reaches far beyond cancer: How do you stay grateful for what saved your life when that same thing keeps taking pieces of it?
Cancer may be my story. That question is everybody’s territory.
Inside these pages is a story about resilience, acceptance, faith, grief, gratitude, and learning that even when we cannot choose what happens to us, we can choose what we do with the life that remains.