I guess I work for a fairly large company. Not the biggest but certainly not small. A while back a number of us who have battled cancer or battling it or have a spouse or family member afflicted by it formed a chat group.

We lost a very young member of this group yesterday and I can see it’s given everyone pause. It’s the rude reality of cancer. It’s one we don’t talk about much. Treatments, medical insurance issues, the trials of recoveries, shared tips on what works and hasn’t, and many more. But death isn’t there till it happens.

Just before that announcement, I was going to add a post to the group about having a good checkup recently and being moved from every 3-month monitoring to every 6 months because my scan was good and bloodwork had stabilized. It seems so irrelevant and out of place now.

Not all of us in this cancer chat have worked with each other or even met. As I said it’s a fairly big company, but we are linked. And when that happens words are hard to come by. Even for some of the professional writers in the group. No matter how strong you are, when you hear that news it stops you in your tracks.

And it activates that dormant box of fear we all carry and keep pushed way down in a place we don’t try to acknowledge, from the time the doctor says to you that you have cancer. The fear you might not be a survivor.

All I know is it breaks my heart to see a 35-year-old taken like this.