When Kim and I first started dating, Kim’s mother was still alive, battling cancer. It cast a tint on everything we did. When Kim trotted me out on the obligatory, “new boyfriend tour”, we visited some of her oldest and closest friends on Cape Cod.

These were people that we could talk openly and honestly with. On the porch in the evenings, we would joke about how people talked about Kim’s mother’s cancer. They would always say "cancer". By this typographic notation, I’m trying to indicate the way they said it. They would lean their head forward, look both to the left and the right to make sure no one else was listening, or could hear, and then say in an urgent loud whisper, the word cancer.

You see, for many of them, cancer isn’t a word you can say normally. It is similar to "vagina". Perhaps this is, in part, because of the cancers we seem to hear the most about are breast cancer, ovarian cancer, prostrate cancer and colon cancer.

After six weeks, the cancer took Kim’s mother. A few years later, our good friend on the Cape had her own serious battle with cancer. She blogged about her experiences, and you could see there, the difficulties that people had talking about cancer.