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.

Last night was a special night for telling stories. I learned a secret about another old friend of mine. He had been a first responder and ground zero during 9/11. He was an EMT who had been working on Wall Street at the time. As he spoke about his reticence to talk about this, similar, it seemed, to the reticence that some old World War II vets had about talking about their experiences in the European theatre. I thought about some of my recent blog posts about how we as a people are dealing, or not dealing, with 9/11. It seems to be very similar to the way people deal with cancer.

In his column in the Washington Post yesterday, Howard Kurtz talked about The Story You Can't And Can Put Down, (NewsTrust Review). He talked about husbands and wives around the nation talking about Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer and whether or not the Edwards are doing the right thing, by living their life, as much as possible, the same way they had been before they learned of the recurrence of the cancer. Kurtz goes on to talk about how the electorate is dealing with other spousal relationships in the campaign.

Here, I think he has missed the true importance of what is going on. Part of what drew me to Sen. Edwards, was his willingness to talk about an issue like poverty, which no one else was really talking about. Now, he and his wife have brought cancer out of the closet. We are having serious discussions about how we live with cancer. I pray that we’ll have similar serious discussions about how we should really deal with 9/11, the war in Iraq, and especially how we can help our servicemen and women when they return.

It all goes back to my comments in America’s Next Top Model.

Perhaps we need a new type of American top model. Perhaps instead of becoming numbed to images of death and destruction, we need to learn to own our fears, respond to them positively and become more empathetic.

By talking openly and honestly about poverty in our nation and the world, and about cancer in their personal life, the Edwards are, perhaps, being the sort of new American Top Model that we really need.