My friend Lauren died of lung cancer the night before I started chemo.  She died a year ago today.

Lauren was the adjunct professor of my first journalism class at Columbia.  When my professor found out I was facing breast cancer, he asked Lauren to meet with me.  She had been diagnosed with stage III lung cancer the year before and had finished surgery, chemo, and radiation.

“Cancer is one big mindf%*#,” I remember her telling me.  “It makes you wonder, ‘Who did I piss off in heaven?’”  Then she told me she had a few friends who were breast cancer survivors and were doing well.  “You’ll get through this,” she promised.

Lauren was tough.  She was a tenacious newspaper reporter.  She told me she didn’t tell her colleagues about her diagnosis because she didn’t want them to feel sorry for her; she wanted them to think she was a bitch.  (her words, not mine)

When her cancer went into remission, she married her fiance and bought a cool apartment in Manhattan. 

 Lauren was like the big sister I never had.  When someone made an insensitive comment to me, like, “I want to have breast cancer so I can get a free boob job!”, I’d call Lauren.  When I was in pain after my mastectomy, when I had a falling out with my oncologist, when I just wanted to talk to someone who I knew would understand, I would call Lauren.

We exchanged cancer articles and iPod playlists and writing ideas. 

And then, just weeks after her honeymoon, her cancer came back. 

She had more surgery, chemo, and radiation.  The sicker she got, the more we talked.  I was taking classes at Columbia again.  Every week when I went into the city, I took the subway to the stop near her apartment, got pizza from the neighborhood pizzeria, and spent the afternoon with her at her apartment.  Her nutritionist had told her to eat more vegetables, which she hated, so her concession was to eat veggie pizza. 

She was writing a column called ‘Life With Cancer’ for her newspaper, so when I went over I’d proofread her column and we’d brainstorm about what topics she should write about next. 

The last time I saw Lauren was one of those afternoons when I took the train into the city, and took the subway to her neighborhood.  We got pizza, then walked to a spa a few blocks away.  She got accupuncture because her chemo was making her nauseated, and I got a massage.  Then we met Barry, a mutual friend who is a New York Times reporter and Columbia professor, at a Starbucks nearby. 

Barry and I left to meet a group of Columbia students for dinner, and Lauren went home. 

A few weeks later, I had reconstructive surgery, and found out that my cancer was back.  As I was getting scans and bone biopsies and a port placement, Lauren’s cancer was growing out of control.  In the two weeks between my diagnosis and starting chemo, I talked to her on the phone a few times.  She had mets to her liver, which caused fluid to accumulate in her abdomen, which put pressure on her lungs.  She sounded more and more out of breath.  And she was in pain. 

Talking was an effort for her, so we started e-mailing instead.  In the last e-mail she wrote to me, she said, “Cancer is f—ing cruel and sick.”  She asked me if I had any Kavorkian ideas.  She just wanted to die, she said.

She died two weeks later at Memorial Sloan Kettering, a cancer hospital in New York City.  She died the night before I started chemo.  It was like she was passing the cancer torch to me to carry on.

I couldn’t go to New York for her funeral because I was sick — the first round of chemo made me vomit incessantly.

I miss Lauren.  When I was going through treatment, there were many times I picked up my phone to call her to ask a question or get advice or get reassurance that everything was going to be okay, and then realized she was gone. 

A year later, I still have her phone number in my cell phone.  I still have her e-mail in my address book.  I still have her memory in my heart.

Today is May 9^th, the two year anniversary of my mastectomy.   Today I woke up crying.  Today, like every other day for the past two years, I asked God why this happened, and I asked Him to take it back.

Today I got out of bed, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat on the couch, looking out the window at the sky as the tears rolled down my face.  Today I remembered what I spend most other days trying to forget.

I remembered the wave of panic I felt when I saw the first drop of blood trickling from my right nipple.  I remembered the cold numbness that swept over me ten days later as I saw the pathology report with my name on it: Positive for malignant cells. 

I remembered picking my parents up from the airport on May 8^th two years ago, taking them out to lunch, and telling them it was okay to let me go if I didn’t wake up from surgery.

And I remembered stepping out of the shower the next morning, touching my fingers to my lips, then touching my fingertips to each breast.  I remembered dressing, driving to the hospital, and never seeing them again.

I remembered waking up from the eight hour surgery in horrific pain.

I remembered spending the following week in the hospital, still in significant pain, trying to wrap my morphine-drenched brain around the reality that my breasts were gone.

I remembered the next few months, when all my friends went back to their normal lives but I couldn’t because I was so sad and lost, and I couldn’t remember what normal was.

I remembered a friend telling me that this was grief, and I would eventually work through it and go from anger to acceptance.  And I remembered saying that if what happened to me was unacceptable, wouldn’t that, by its very definition, preclude me from accepting it?  

I remembered chatting with a woman from my online support group who told me that after her mastectomy, her Kabala instructor told her to write an obituary for her breasts.  Go write that obit and have a good cry, honey, she urged me.  But I never did, because it seemed to me that if I said good-bye to my breasts, I would have to face the reality that they were really gone, and that was too much to handle.

I remembered the many times I told my boyfriend I was scared of the cancer coming back, and the many times he reassured me that they’d caught it early and I was okay…and then, almost exactly one year later, it did come back and my already-fragile world fell completely apart.

I remembered calling my parents, scheduling surgery, having bone scans and biopsies, then holding my breath for days at a time while I waited for my oncologist to call me with the results.  

I remembered starting chemo and waking up one morning with more hair on my pillow than on my head and deciding it was time to shave it.  I remembered trying on my wig, staring at the mirror into hollow eyes, trying to figure out who that pale, sickly girl was looking back at me.

I remembered the tedious days of radiation, of getting undressed and lying down on the cold metal table time after time after time.  I remembered my last day of radiation, when the nurses presented me with a box of tissues as a parting gift because I’d cried my way through the treatments.

I remember winding up in the ICU in sepsis from pneumonia, praying that God would take my life if it wasn’t going to get any better than this — I had been in treatments for nearly seven months, and I was exhausted.

I remembered taking a cab to my apartment when I was discharged from the hospital because my parents had gone home and my friends were too busy to pick me up.  And I remembered dropping my suitcase, sitting on the edge of my bed and sobbing, feeling absolutely alone.

I remembered packing my things into two suitcases and a carry on, and getting on a plane from New York to Portland to start my life over…which brings me to the Portland apartment I woke up in this morning, where I commemorated the second anniversary of my mastectomy.

I didn’t tell anybody about the significance of today –  not because I didn’t want them to know, but because the words are so hard and so ugly, I can’t bring myself to say them out loud.

As I’m writing this, today is almost over.  And, by God’s grace, these yesterdays are over, too.  When I finish writing this, I will wrap up these memories and not think about them again for a long time.

 So all I’m left with is tomorrow.

Tomorrow, by God’s grace, I will wake up.  Tomorrow, I will breathe in, then I’ll breathe out.  And after that, I’ll breathe again.  

And again,

and again,

and again.