Finding fortitude when sickness is waiting in the wings.
“This round of cancer won’t kill you. You’ll get hit by a car crossing the street when you least expect it.”
My older sister, Madeleine, in her brand of dry, maudlin humor, was trying to make me laugh, as we sat side by side in the waiting room of the cancer radiology center. It was February 2024, and we had placed our hats, scarves, and quilted hooded coats on the neat green pleather chair beside us.
I was listening for the nurse to call my name for what seemed like my millionth round of radiation treating my stage 3 aggressive, invasive breast cancer—my second time around. Madeleine was doing her best to distract—if not eradicate—my fears of expiring anytime soon.
I laughed. So she reminded me, “It’s not that funny. Those are the drugs you are on.”
The fact that I am mortal—like every other creature who ever lived—and that at any time I could die, hadn’t really sunk in before then. I concentrated on surviving, being positive, and feeling lucky they caught it.
I cannot erase the notion that I—as well as every member of the cancer club—was hosting the death sentence within, unnoticed, undiagnosed. The illness was fermenting until it was discovered; then it took over and engulfed me and everyone around me. We all had to deal with the complications of its presence.
Despite the fact that I am now more than one year cancer-free, I feel newly immersed in a fog of imminent peril: 2025 was the year of new cancer diagnoses for an unfathomable number of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, both older and younger than me. It seems all at once each is in emphatically dizzying stages of survival.
Each of them are burdened with different types, stages, prognoses, and severities of the disease. The specific locus of their journeys is on my mind every day. And I do my best to lend love and support.
The high incidence in friends is multiplied by the bombardment of celebrity obituaries bursting with cancer mentions. Madeleine Wickham, the author known as Sophie Kinsella, recently died from brain cancer. Actress Kelley Mack died from diffuse midline glioma at 33; D’Angelo, the R&B star, died of cancer at 51. Diane Keaton’s death at 79 was apparently due to skin cancer. We mourned Catherine O’Hara’s recent death at 71 from a pulmonary embolism, and an ongoing case of rectal cancer. James Van Der Beek died too young at 48 of colorectal cancer.
More than two million people in the U.S. were diagnosed with cancer in 2025, according to the American Cancer Society. World Data shows that 618,120 Americans will have died from cancer in 2025. That is approximately 1,700 cancer deaths every single day. Chances are we all know someone in that count.
In the span of about one month, seven people I know well were surprised by the diagnosis, as if the doorbell rang and it was the Grim Reaper.
In the past four years, I lost my brother, Paul, to multiple myeloma, and one of my best friends, Lisa, to lung cancer. My brother’s wife, Bernadette, had died in her sleep of an undiagnosed brain tumor in 2004, when she was 49. My brother Bill’s wife died of ovarian cancer in 2008. This is just the beginning of a list that includes many more dear friends and awful diagnoses.
My own ongoing treatments of injections, acupuncture, massage, and physical therapy—for pain and neuropathy—has helped. But it has also robbed me of the feeling that I am physically who I thought I was—a healthy woman who is competent and full of life with a long way to go to achieve what I planned for myself.
Because of my personal proximity to all these prognoses, at 67, I am feeling the imminence of death to my core. I am older than my father was when he passed at 66. I am older than my brother when he died at 64. It is not as much a sense of doom, but a sense of urgency—and not just for my friends, but for myself. This is it. Time to get real.
I better make a run for it—toward the joy, laughter, pink sunset over the lake, the bestseller I need to write. I know it is selfish because it’s all about me. But death is about each one of us and I am haunted by the feeling that I am not and have not done enough. Of course I have not lived as fully nor accomplished anywhere near as much as I planned or hoped. Does anyone?
I am trying to model resilience and strength as the recent example of triumph—again—over the C word. I express myself always as grateful, thankful to everyone and for everything I was given and endured. No remorse, just gratitude.
Anderson Cooper recently interviewed Australian musician Nick Cave on CNN. The author of Faith, Hope, and Carnage, was speaking about the death of his two sons. “I can look at you, you can look at me, and we understand that within our lives, whatever they may be, there is this sort of thread of loss that runs through,” Cave said.
The loss, as someone assigned cancer and all its reverberations, is of the person we were before tussling with this invasion.The grief I feel is for the person I may never get to be.
I will most likely never be the outrageously successful writer applauded and acclaimed for every sentence. I may never live happily ever after with my soul mate even though the last two psychics promised I would; they just did not say when. I may never see all three of my sons happily married with healthy children who call me “Mama Mich.” I may never get to Australia. Or Hawaii.
My late mother, who died in 2002 at the age of 80, had a mantra that she echoed every time any of my five brothers and sisters and I went to a friend’s house, party, reunion, get-together, playdate, you name it.
“Never show up empty handed.”
Throughout the ’60s and ’70s when we were all under her roof, my mom would hand us cookies or banana bread to bring wherever we were visiting and advised us on establishing a reputation as a giver.
For a while as a child, I thought this mandatory gift accompaniment was a gesture to soften the blow of my presence. But I grew to learn that it labels you as someone thoughtful and generous, appreciative. Who has manners. Who was “raised right.” Whose mother lectured about the tender requirements of civility.
I internalized the practice into permanence. I tried to instill that ground rule into each of my three grown sons. I am not sure if it adhered, but their partners regularly come to my house with flowers.
The past year has me grappling with gratitude for all I have enjoyed, but also with the disruptive, painful uncertainty of the fates of my friends. I feel certain of very little.
What I do know is I do not want to go empty handed into whatever comes next. I want to be a person who is generous and loving, reliable and comforting. I do not want to be some anxious worry wart (another Mom phrase) trying to check off every item on her bucket list before going quietly into that good night.
Not going into the unknown empty handed means I will embrace whatever comes into my life with grace—whether it is another loss, more grief, or my own shortcomings. I will feel that I am enough and it will be enough to be full of hope, possibility, and acceptance of whatever life delivers to my door.
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