Chapter 2

December, 2006

I realized if I called Don, I was just going to upset him, because I was on the verge of tears. So instead, I emailed him. I was a stay-at-home mom, and he was a project manager in a local IT department, and we emailed back and forth all the time. Our toddler boy permitted me to type a lot more readily than he let me talk on the phone.

I sent a terse note: Okay, so the cells are malignant. That’s not good. I’m sorry. But it’s Hodgkin’s, right?

He’d been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a fairly rare form of lymphatic cancer, when he was only twenty-five. No one wants cancer, but if you must get cancer, Hodgkin’s is the kind to get. It’s very responsive to current treatments, and it has a very high survival rate. His oncologist had done yearly checkups for ten years, then discharged him, telling him he had no more risk of Hodgkin’s than the general population now.

Even so, I thought, it had to be Hodgkin’s. Or possibly leukemia. I knew he was at somewhat more risk for that, too.

But I wasn’t prepared for the reply.

They’re not sure yet, but the one thing they do know is it’s not Hodgkin’s or leukemia. It’s a glandular cancer.

I quickly ran a search on the Internet, then drew in a shaky breath and emailed him back.

I looked up “glandular cancer,” and it means: a malignant tumor originating in glandular epithelium. Uh, that might help if I knew what an epithelium was. I get the impression it means any tumor that isn’t lymphoma or leukemia. Is that the impression you get?

He emailed me back: Pretty much.

So it wasn’t Hodgkin’s, or leukemia. In short, it wasn’t anything I’d braced myself for. If I was reading these websites correctly, it looked like a “glandular” cancer was one that started in an organ, like colon cancer. Or, since the problem seemed to be in his lungs… lung cancer.

I didn’t like that idea. I might not be a doctor, but I knew that if you had to have cancer, lung cancer was certainly not the type you wanted to have.

I sighed, turned back to the computer, and emailed: How the hell did you manage to get two different types of cancer before you turned forty?

His answer was typically terse and wry.

Just lucky, I guess.

*****

May, 1985

I walked down Virginia Beach’s boardwalk. It was dark, well after midnight. A round moon rode high in the sky, and the sound of the waves hitting the shore filled my ears. I wore a ruffled, white gown, and Don wore a white tuxedo. I was seventeen, and he was eighteen.

We’d gone to the senior prom together. We weren’t officially dating, but we’d been friends all through the school year. We’d played chess before school and during lunch (I’d won exactly twice, out of hundreds of matches), and talked quite a bit.

We were friends, very good friends. But we weren’t dating. This was our first date, and it was clearly intended as a friend thing.

Don was definitely a nice guy, literally a Boy Scout. He was old-fashioned and sweet, even somewhat on the naïve side. We’d danced together at the prom, and afterward he’d suggested coming out to the boardwalk instead of going to a party. So we did. It was two in the morning, and neither of us was in any hurry to get home.

When he did finally take me home, he walked me to my door, smiled down at me, and hugged me. But he left without kissing me goodnight, because we were friends.

Even when we started truly dating a few months later, we remained close friends.

Read Chapter 3 here.