(ZENIT News / Rome, 13.02.2024).- In 2019 Tammy Peterson, wife of famed Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, was diagnosed with terminal cancer when she had a medical checkup following a surgery she had earlier that year. When she received the results of the check-up, the doctor told her that they had found a cancerous tumor that would end her life in a matter of ten months.
She had another surgery, but this one did not benefit her: on the contrary, her situation worsened and she had to be hospitalized. Once she was hospitalized, a friend of hers visited her in the hospital and brought her a couple of Rosaries blessed by the Pope. Although Tammy did not know how to pray very well, her friend taught her. For five weeks she daily visited her in the hospital and each day she prayed the Rosary with her.
When asked what her experience was like praying the Rosary with her friend, Tammy noted that the Rosary helped her enter into a contemplation of the mysteries of Christ in a very rhythmic way.
When going through this stage of painful surgery, Tammy continually prayed the «Our Father» and this helped her to get through it. In addition, she assures that she began to face the future life without worrying about it, even to this day she affirms that she does not fear death.
After a few months they found a doctor who could help her, but before leaving the hospital Tammy asked to be blessed by a priest. Father Heric Nicolai blessed her and gave her an Opus Dei novena for the sick. She began to pray it and, on the fifth day of praying it, the leak in her lymphatic system closed up. That day was also her thirty-second wedding anniversary with her husband, the day she had promised him she would get out of the hospital. A gift on a wedding anniversary.
Tammy is currently in the process of converting to Catholicism (she will be formally welcomed at Easter 2024), having been raised Protestant. But she says that when she was little she felt that something of Mary was missing in the Church she attended and some time later, upon receiving a Rosary from a cousin of her great-great-grandmother, she realized that she wanted to become a Catholic as well.
She claims to pray the Rosary every day and invites everyone to do the same because the Rosary is a practice that centers you in the midst of the world’s dispersion: «In life there is suffering and you are going to need to have something to hold on to when the earth opens up and there is nothing underneath you. And when that happens, God can pick you back up.» Tammy’s story is told by herself in her podcast which can be heard here.
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