I have seasonal allergies, so I have felt like dirt all day. Dull headache, dizziness, generally unhappy. At this late date, I’m no longer the cancer survivor who sucks the marrow out of every single moment of every day. I complain, the same way other civilians do.

But to complain is a privilege. To be alive to suffer from something as innocuous as seasonal allergies is a tremendous gift. A privilege and a gift that someone very dear to me lost this week, someone whom I will speak about soon.

On this date in 2013, the phone rang, and my dermatologist told me what the pathology results were of a skin biopsy I’d had the previous week. It was malignant melanoma. It was mid-April, and as Lou Reed observed in his song “What’s Good,” “What good was cancer in April? / No good at all.” I stood with the cordless phone in my hand by the living room window, which overlooked a Brooklyn scene of flowering trees and passersby on the sidewalk, and wondered if I’d be gone by the following spring. And now thirteen years have passed.

Two years later, on the same exact date, I was lying in a hospital bed letting the news sink in that I had nine metastatic tumors in my brain, which were discovered 24 hours after Dr. P had pronounced my lungs NED. I still remember the unbelievably good hospital food to this day. (These things matter. As I say in the manifesto that introduces this blog, The minutiae are everything.)

And here I am eleven years past brain tumors. Working as a medical librarian and interjecting my story in the classroom (when it is relevant), for the chance to see future MDs stare at me agog and realize their librarian instructor has Been Through It… but that she still takes a dim view of their use of AI.

I first met Claire at Crunch Gym on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. It would have been around 2008, I think — when I had more than a year of motherhood under my belt, but I probably couldn’t buckle my belt due to excess baby weight I was still toting around. I didn’t know what I was doing, and there were all these trainers circulating in their black t-shirts, squiring their clients around to different stations. As I observed, I noticed most of them seemed bored or checked out. Not looking at their smartphones, since those weren’t yet ubiquitous, but definitely not taking much of an interest in their clients.

And then there was Claire. She walked with an almost regal bearing, because she was a Queen. (I later learned about her international modeling career.) She had a passing resemblance to Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, who played the titular character in the 1981 film, Diva. But Claire was no diva. She was a genuinely talented trainer, and what I observed in her interactions with her clients was pure engagement and focus and care. I signed up immediately, and Claire took me under her wing, guiding me through Superwoman stretches on the floor and situps on the Roman chair to strengthen my posterior chain.

But then it turned out Claire was also a neighbor, so just like the midwife who delivered Young A became a friend because she lived down the block, so too Claire became a friend. And when she and my friend N were having babies and due around the same time, I invited them over to my apartment one afternoon for a “playdate” — as much of a playdate as two newly emerged babies could have while still mostly in the potted plant stage.

Social media replaced our in-person interactions when I moved away from Brooklyn, and the waning use of social media on both her part and mine meant that I wasn’t aware of Claire’s illness until a friend of hers posted on Facebook last week, seeking prayers for her.

But many years before this point, Claire was following my cancer saga, and on April 16, 2015, she left this comment on my Facebook post from that day:

Last week, I remembered a video from the pandemic which Claire had posted on Facebook, which I will share here because it shows both Claire and her daughter, Grace. Grace had won a young composers competition, and both she and her mother were interviewed about her winning piece:

I wish I had known about her illness with enough time to send Claire my wishes, my tears, and my gratitude for the time that our lives intersected. I did have an opportunity to contribute to a fundraiser for Claire’s daughter, a high school senior who heads to college next fall.

Thank you for everything, Claire.

FUCK CANCER, for the way it continues to leave concentric circles of bereft and bereaved people all over the map. I will never stop wishing for a cure that works for all.