Cancer

I have been lucky: with the exception of my grandparents, who had gotten on in years, I have never had someone very close to me die. A couple of my childhood friends died in car accidents, but I was a kid then, and I didn't experience the sense of loss that attends the death of a young adult: one who, over time, has built a world around themselves, but whose life's work and connections with others, while still building themselves, are suddenly cut short. The fact that I have largely avoided tragedy sometimes scares me, because I don't know how I'll handle loss when it inevitably confronts me. I am very inexperienced in dealing with death.

When I was a child, I remember listening to my parents talk about two of their best friends from college, a married couple, one of whom had developed terminal breast cancer in her late 30's. We made several trips to see the friends, and, as a child, I understood that everyone was very sad about her cancer, but, being disconnected by both age and my relative lack of closeness to her, I never felt anything that could be described as pain. I felt empathy, but never pain. When she died, my sister and I stayed with our grandparents while my parents went to her funeral. I remember my mother crying a lot in the days surrounding her death, and I've never understood that emotion until very recently.

One of my oldest and best friends just found out that his girlfriend, someone who has been his closest confidant for years, has brain cancer, and it doesn't look good. Speaking with my usually-happy-go-lucky friend, I hear a helplessness and lostness that I've never heard before in his voice. He lives some miles away, and I haven't spent a lot of time with his girlfriend, but, in the time I spent with the two of them, I witnessed a happy and sincere friendship, and I saw her as someone with whom he was truly compatible. I like her very much. I imagined that they would stay together possibly for the rest of their lives, and we would all get together on holidays and send pictures of our kids to each other. To imagine her dying, and to think of my best friend suddenly and terribly losing his closest companion, makes me incredibly sad. I can't claim to understand the pain that he must feel, but I understand a little better the emotion that my mother must have experienced as she cried over the death of her college friend.

It feels absurd to imagine a young friend--who you know as this vibrant, alert, thoughtful, full-of-potential, just-getting-started person--being dead. To think that each thing about her--her quirky musical tastes, this weird way she laughs, the appreciative smile she brings to my friend's face--would all be extinguished, is unbearable. But, ultimately, it's something that we'll have to bear, some more than others, and that feeling of powerlessness is a hard thing to accept. Of course, we can always hope for miracles, but, more often than not, our hopes for metaphysical intervention falter in the face of our bodies' inarguable mortality. This feeling is something new to me, and I fear it's new to my friend as well, and I know that he is feeling it far more intensely than I am. I suppose that my job now is to be available to him as an ear to speak to or a shoulder to cry on, and to work hard to do good for those who I care about, reminded by this event of how quickly we can lose someone's irreplaceable company.