My Friend Died of a Cancer that a Vaccine Can Prevent

If she had been ten years younger, she likely would have been vaccinated at the age when it mattered most.

Six years before Jamie died, the two of us drove straight through Minnesota to Montana with our husbands, twenty hours in a blue jay-colored sedan packed so full the trunk sometimes popped open on the highway. Hiking gear, tents, bear spray, emergency beef jerky—everything pressed together, inescapable. We sang for hours. We argued about music and took turns driving and sleeping. We laughed until our stomachs hurt. It felt like one of those times when you know, even while you’re in it, that it will matter later. 

One morning, we set out early to hike up to a glacial lake. The air was thin and sharp, the sun already bright. Sweat dried quickly on our skin as we climbed and climbed and climbed. I shouted into the trees now and then, half-joking warnings for bears. Jamie sang, something improvised, something ridiculous, about the stars we couldn’t see in daylight. Our husbands joined in. We moved up the mountain in a chorus of melody and joy. 

At a bend in the trail, we turned a corner and stopped short. Less than twenty feet away stood a mountain goat, far larger than I would have imagined up close. He was pure white, his horns enormous and curved, his body solid and unmoving. He looked as surprised to see us as we were to see him. No one spoke. No one reached for a camera. We just stood there, suspended, staring at each other. Five seconds passed. Or maybe sixty. It was impossible to tell. Then, without urgency, the goat turned and disappeared into the brush. 

We looked at each other and laughed, not loudly, but in disbelief. We all agreed we had just seen something rare. There was no proof. Only the shared certainty that it had happened. 

At the top of the climb, the lake stretched out in front of us, cold and impossibly blue. Jamie and I stripped down, standing shoulder to shoulder at the edge. “Tits to the sky!” she yelled into the wind, grinning as it echoed back. All of Montana spread out below us. Her husband took a photo from behind. Our backs bare, arms akimbo, breeze on our skin. We laughed and laughed and laughed. 

It felt endless then. Like we had all the time in the world. 

Four years later, on their last night in Minnesota before moving to Arizona, Jamie and her husband hosted a small campfire gathering in their backyard. The mountains were calling them west. We sat side by side in the glow of the fire, eating pizza off paper plates, talking about what came next. 

At some point, she leaned over and said quietly, “I have weird news. It might be nothing, but my Pap smear came back abnormal, and they did a biopsy. I won’t know more until we get to Arizona, but I wanted you to know.”

The slice of pizza in my hand had gone cold. I wiped the grease from my fingers, reached for her hand, and told her it was probably nothing. She’d had abnormal Pap smears and unexplained bleeding for years. It always came back fine. 

About a week later, the results came in. Cervical cancer. Stage 1. They had caught it early. Treatment seemed possible. It was May of 2020, and she began chemotherapy in a new state during the height of the pandemic, far from the people who loved her. Her husband carried most of the weight alone. 

From the outside, life went on. Our group chat stayed buoyant, filled with jokes and a confidence that she would beat this and move on. She texted us from the chemo infusion room. We cheered her through treatment. When she rang the bell signaling she was done with radiation, we cried with relief. The joy carried us forward. 

In the season that followed, when restrictions lifted, she and her husband pursued surrogacy. We visited as often as we could. In December of the following year, they welcomed a baby daughter. When we arrived to meet her, Jamie looked tired. She mentioned that her back and hips hurt, that she wasn’t sleeping well. We chalked it up to new parenthood, unfamiliar beds, and the strain of carrying a baby. 

Six weeks later, new scans came back. 

The cancer had spread everywhere. Bones, organs, places that explained the pain she’d been trying to ignore. It hadn’t been in remission. It had been waiting. 

This time, it was stage 4. 

After the chemo treatments and clinical studies failed, Jamie and her family moved back to Minnesota to live with her mother. This return home meant that we could be with her much like we had in the early days. We visited in groups, bending hospital rules, filling rooms with laughter that startled nurses and doctors. 

The shape of time had changed. We were no longer hoping for a cure, but we were still showing up, still caring for her together, still holding her life as it was. 

In the final months, we learned the rhythms of her decline. We brought small comforts. Ginger drops. Lozenges. Tea that rarely stayed down. She was still trying treatments and still hoping for more time. Even as her body failed her, Jamie kept singing. Sometimes it was real songs, sometimes nonsense, sometimes just sound. We sang with her. We cried with her. Our husbands cried with us. 

Near the end, home hospice joined us. With a nurse guiding us, we helped bathe her, the work slow and careful. Her body was so far from the woman who had stripped down on a mountain years earlier. At one point, she pulled me close and gestured to her open hospital gown, rasping a laugh: “Tits to the sky.” Even then, there was humor. Even then, there was insistence on being herself. 

Jamie died at 40 on July 4, 2023, from cervical cancer caused by HPV, a virus so common that most sexually active adults are exposed to it at some point in their lives, according to the CDC. For years, her Pap smears showed abnormalities. For years, those abnormalities resolved. When they didn’t, the cancer had already taken hold. 

I watched my friend die slowly. I would not wish that kind of death on anyone. 

What I did not understand then, and what many women my age were never told, is that there is a vaccine that prevents the strains of HPV most likely to cause cervical cancer. When it was first introduced, eligibility was narrow and recommendations were inconsistent. By the time guidance caught up, many of us were already considered too old. Jamie and I, along with most of our friends, were part of that gap. 

In October 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration expanded approval of the HPV vaccine (Gardasil 9) to include women and men up to age 45, making it possible for adults like me who had missed the original window to get vaccinated later in life. That summer, Jamie and I were both newly married, in our thirties, and in monogamous relationships, and we assumed the vaccine was no longer necessary for us. 

This year, at 42, I chose to get the HPV vaccine in Jamie’s honor. There was no fanfare, just the clinician at CVS noting that I was still eligible when I went in for my annual flu shot. She asked if I wanted to add it to my visit, and I said yes. Even though I am likely past the period of greatest risk, I wanted to make sure I had what Jamie didn’t have the opportunity to receive. 

Vaccine hesitancy is on the rise in the United States, and HPV vaccination rates have stalled below public-health targets, with hesitancy and gaps in provider recommendation cited as contributing factors in multiple public-health studies. My friend needlessly died from a cancer the HPV vaccine can prevent. Had she been ten years younger, she likely would have received it at the moment when prevention makes the difference between life and death. I want women my age to know they are still eligible. I want parents to vaccinate their daughters and their sons against HPV, so fewer families have to live with this kind of loss. 

At her memorial, I shared the story of the mountain goat we had encountered on our adventure in Montana. How time seemed to stop as we stood silently, gazing at the unexpected beauty in front of us. How unafraid it was of our presence. There was no proof of what we had seen. All we had was our shared certainty that we had witnessed something rare and extraordinary, up close and for a very brief moment. 

Knowing Jamie was just like that. Her magic was astonishing, a joy to behold, and far too brief to feel fair. I will always want more time with that mountain goat. I will never get more time with Jamie.

Jamie’s death did not have to happen. There is a vaccine that prevents the cancer that killed her, and there are still too many people who do not know they are eligible or who are never told it matters. I cannot give Jamie more time. What I can do is tell her story so fewer daughters lose their mothers, fewer friends stand where I stood, and fewer families carry a grief that did not have to happen.

If you’re interested in reading more of Sarah Hanson’s work, her book Conjuring the Hurricane, a survival memoir-in-verse about leaving a life that’s killing you and rebuilding a self you can finally live inside, is available on Bookshop.org.

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