My friend Leroy Sievers died on Friday night. I considered him a friend, but the truth is I never actually met him. I read his "My Cancer" blog on npr.com every day, and although I was never one of the many to post comments there, I read those, too, and considered the regulars to be my friends.
Leroy was a brave and distinguished journalist: He covered wars, went to dangerous places all over the globe and was the executive producer of "Nightline." But while he clearly had some fun covering the wars and going to the dangerous places, there wasn't much fun in the two and a half-year struggle against the recurrence of his colon cancer that ended Friday night.
But he made me laugh. And cry. And feel grateful. And silly. His description of "cancer world," his love of chocolate chip cookies, his commitment to Harry Potter, his debates about whether he would wear the new shoes and pants long enough to make their purchase worthwhile evidenced a level of openness, honesty and integrity that you don't find in many places.
In my experience, cancer is something no one wants to talk about. Dying is something we pretend isn't happening. People who are diagnosed with cancer usually find themselves losing friends — the ones who don't know what to say and secretly fear it's contagious or at least depressing — not making them.
For Leroy, it was just the opposite. His cancer brought people to him. Being a friend of Leroy's — even, like me, an invisible virtual friend — was a blessing, not a burden.
I'll admit that I sometimes got sidetracked into the world of denial, and I think I wasn't the only one. Leroy's struggles with his spine reminded me so much of my old friend Judy's struggles with her leg. She was fighting lung cancer, and she got a clot in her leg. They had to amputate it, and she had to learn to function with the artificial leg. And the truth is, while all that was going on, even though we knew the cancer was the cause and that amputating her leg wouldn't do anything to stop it, the focus on the surgery and the recovery and the rehabilitation was sufficiently intense, and she was ultimately so triumphant in dealing with it, that it was easy to forget about the other battle, the one that wasn't a fair fight and couldn't be won.
When Judy was sick, I collected every story I could find about someone who, despite all odds, lived inside a body that could live with a curse of cancer that would kill anyone else.
I convinced myself, almost, that "incurable cancer" was sort of like diabetes, sort of like AIDS is now, the sort of disease that no one wants, that takes its toll, but that doesn't necessarily kill you. As if.
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