Bad news from an old friend

All I can think this morning is "please, no." My close friend from college days called last night to tell me that his cancer is back, metastasised in multiple sites, Stage IV, the diagnosis we who have had it once dread, and yet always half-expect.

I wanted to scream at the heavens and rend garments, keen on the floor and howl at the moon. I curled up on the couch and cried myself to sleep instead. I only know what it's like to have an initial finding of cancer and go through a few long months of anticipating and steeling for the worst--I can't really comprehend what the finality of such a diagnosis feels like for him and his family. To have gone through multiple surgeries and chemo twice over the last 3 years, and then have to face it again, this time with a flashing "FINISH" line the only sure outcome?

I don't even remember the first time we met, but it was in the first few weeks of freshman year, when we were both 17. He eventually became my roommate's boyfriend, but the three of us were inseparable for two years--studying, partying, day trips to the mountains and weekends camping on the beach. When he moved to San Francisco, I made trips to visit, so we could still talk long into the night together. I was at his wedding, and then his graduation from medical school, celebrating with them. He and his wife had their first child shortly after Bill and I had ours, and the four of us would get together and laugh through our mutual parenting experiences of sheer wonder and overwhelming exhaustion.

Then, somehow in the crush of busy family lives, we lost track of each other for more than two decades. Last summer, I tracked them down when I drove out West, determined to reconnect, though at the time, I didn't know why I felt it was so urgent to do so. When I was diagnosed, he and his wife talked me through the panic-stages, having been through it themselves, having emerged on the other side. They told me it was all going to be all right.

But it's not all right. I'm fine, and his is back, and there's only a vast, gaping abyss in my heart this morning, a grieving that I can't imagine will ever stop.