I am surrounded by cancer this week.

Tuesday I went scouting for Relay for Life site alternatives in case there are problems in Somerset. (There will not be, according to their superintendent.) All of us had a cancer story–including the death of a close friend of the outgoing chairs who died of NET the week after Jane. We all have a reason we Relay that touches our souls.

Wednesday night, Steve Jobs died of NET–but it could have been Jane all over again. Images of her last weeks superimposed themselves on his death. I know with ungodly precision what his wife experienced in recent days. Her 18 years were likely not enough in the same way that our 21 years, three months and eight days were not enough. And nothing prepares you for the end of this particular cancer.

Thursday I buried myself in writing a press release and trying to expiate my anger at the unfairness of it all. As one of my former students put it so poignantly on Facebook, we have lost two great minds to this disease in less than a year.

I went out to coffee with an old student this morning. Part of the conversation was about the fact she is going in for cancer surgery next week.

I came home this afternoon and decided to go for a walk. My neighbor was out fixing a flagstone on his front walk. One year ago he was in rehab and undergoing treatment following his operation for kidney cancer. The neighbor across the street is a bladder cancer survivor.

As I walked on down the street I thought about my uncle, who died of spinal cancer in the 1970s, about my downstairs neighbor when I first started teaching who died just before Christmas from lung cancer, about his wife who died of another cancer–she never told me what it was–less than two years later.

I remembered my friend in graduate school who was diagnosed with lung cancer just before we started classes–and who, during our second year, ate nothing but ice cream because that was all her body could handle. I remembered another friend in graduate school who had fought off leukemia but worried about its return.

I remembered visiting our downstairs neighbor during her chemo treatments for leukemia–and remembered far too vividly the great hacking vomiting spells she went through in the middle of a conversation–and how she picked up the conversation as though nothing had happened when the spasm had passed. And I remembered our last visit to her the day before she died and how she had seemed to shrink into herself in the time since we had last seen her.

I remembered the tears on the faces of all the students we had who had lost mothers to breast cancer–and fathers to a half-dozen other kinds of cancer.

But I also remembered the smile on my sister’s face at Christmas last year when she could as easily have been dead more than a decade ago from breast cancer. And the smile on another friend’s face who could have suffered the same fate at the hands of the same disease. I remembered the smile on my brother’s face, who could be gone from skin cancer. I remembered the smile on my sister-in-law’s face last week, who could be buried right now next to my wife but for the progress we have made in detecting some cancers early.

We have made progress on killing cancer. There are more five year survivors than there were 20 years ago or 40 years ago.

Some cancers, like the basal and squamous skin cancers I have taken off my face periodically, have become no more of a concern than the common cold. The only time I mention them is to remind my students that they need to stay out of tanning salons and wear sunscreen when they are going out in the sun. I joke about my annual trip to see what part of my face they are going to hack off this year.

But for others, like NET and pancreatic cancer, we are little better off than we were 30 years ago. They are still killers, still cancers that the only question, in too many cases, is, “How long do you have?”

So I walk. You come, too.