“I had a friend named Tom, Heather. He was an older guy, but not that old. Maybe midforties. Great guy. He was a bit of a mentor for me. I worked with him on that newspaper. He wanted the same things I did, more or less. Wanted to be a journalist, all of that. Then one day when he was shaving, he found a lump right above his collarbone. He went to the doctor, the doctor diagnosed it as cancer, and nine months later, he was dead. I don’t know if I’ve ever fully acknowledged what it did to me. Mentally, I mean. He went from being a fortysomething-year-old in perfect health to a cancer patient in
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