I recently attended a wake for a friend’s sister. She was twenty-two. Twenty-two. The age when most of us are busy trying to decide whether to keep our college futon or finally graduate to real furniture, whether we’re meant to be teachers or consultants or baristas with an MFA on the side.
She didn’t get that luxury. She had been fighting osteosarcoma since she was ten, and the cancer never let her forget it. Yet somehow, in those twelve years, she managed to burn brighter than people twice her age with twice her time.
She had a way of reinventing herself every time cancer tried to take something away. When the tumor in her leg ended her Irish dance career, she didn’t wallow; she picked up duct tape and started making wallets and flowers for the other kids on the oncology floor.
Later, she crocheted, launched an Etsy shop, designed stickers and jewelry, donated proceeds to pediatric cancer causes, and created logos for awareness campaigns. She sang on stage with a voice that could silence a crowd. She made people laugh. She coached younger kids. She started a podcast. She spoke at the NIH. She packed care packages for other patients even in her final days.
She did all of this while tethered to IV poles. I, on the other hand, regularly lose my patience when someone leaves an empty Goldfish bag in the pantry. Perspective is a ruthless teacher.
At the same time, another friend of mine is still in the fight. Stage IV ovarian cancer. She has a young child. She has been a teacher for decades, a choreographer, and a mentor. She has shaped hundreds of children, mine included, teaching them to point their toes and believe in themselves. She’s the kind of person who makes other people’s kids feel like they matter. And now she spends her days toggling between chemo and motherhood, still showing up for her students even while her own body betrays her.
The brutal unfairness of it gnaws at me. How cancer always seems to go after the people who give the most, the ones whose absence would leave holes too big to patch.
Before law school, I worked at a children’s cancer research hospital. My job was intricately tied to science: pathways and proteins, clinical protocols, and patents that might one day become therapies. I thought I understood cancer. I knew the basics — that it isn’t one disease but hundreds, each with its own genetic quirks and survival tactics. That tumors mutate like criminals learning new disguises. Early detection is the lifeline for some cancers and a cruel mirage for others. Ovarian cancer, for example, is a master of hiding until it’s too late.
I know survival rates are improving. More than half of patients now live longer than ten years, and researchers are moving at a pace unimaginable a generation ago. Immunotherapy. Genetic sequencing. AI models predicting treatment response. In the lab, progress feels tangible.
But knowing it in the lab is not the same as living it in the world. No chart or dataset prepares you for the real thing: funerals that come too soon, friends who measure life in treatment cycles, children who grow up with grief as their bedtime story.
And it definitely doesn’t prepare you for the absurdity of how ordinary life keeps barreling forward. Because here’s the thing: cancer doesn’t stop everything else.
The day of the wake, I came home still raw, mascara smudged, “Pink Pony Club” still ringing in my ears. My kids, oblivious, were in full-scale warfare over the last popsicle. Nothing says “welcome back from contemplating mortality” quite like your son shrieking that his sister looked at him with her eyeballs.
That’s the whiplash. One moment you’re mourning someone, a recent college grad, the next you’re hissing at your kid to put on shoes because the bus is outside and we are not missing it again.
Cancer is a shapeshifter. But so is parenting.
It’s tempting, in moments like this, to look for meaning. To wring some lesson out of the juxtaposition of death and popsicle wars. But what lingers isn’t meaning — it’s the collision itself. My friend’s sister’s duct tape flowers taped to hospital walls. My friend’s dance studio still humming while she fights for her life. My kids shrieking about snacks in the middle of it all. The unbearable pressed right up against the ridiculous.
The Mayo Clinic recently described why cancer is so hard to cure. It mutates. It hides. It isn’t one thing but many. And even when treatments are effective, they don’t work the same way for everyone. Access to care depends on geography, race, gender, and luck. Cancer doesn’t care about fairness. It doesn’t care that my friend’s sister still had shows to perform, or that my friend has a child who needs her. It doesn’t care that families like mine spend our mornings ping-ponging between tears in the parking lot and yelling at someone to pack their lunch already.
And yet—progress is real. Kids who would have died a generation ago are alive today. Therapies are sharper, kinder, smarter. The labs I once worked in are still fighting, even as funerals, wakes, and memorial services remind us how much further there is to go.
What do you do with that? With grief that crashes into the smell of mac and cheese on the stove, with statistics that don’t blunt the sound of children crying at their mother’s bedside?
I don’t know. I only know that cancer has a way of making the ordinary feel extraordinary in its own right. Popsicle fights, carpool chaos, mismatched socks — they’re infuriating, yes, but they’re also proof of life. Loud, messy, relentless life.
I keep thinking there should be some grand takeaway. Something about resilience, or the meaning of life, or how to hold onto joy in the face of despair. But that’s not what I have. What I have is this: grief in one pocket and half a melted popsicle in the other. And somehow, for now, that feels like enough.
