Spider Robinson is a man whose works have had an outsized influence on many people’s lives.

I first encountered his stories in Analog when I was but a young lad. I had read Gandhi, Sartre, Martin Luther King, and the Bible. I had read the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. I could recite whole sections of the Tao and could rattle off the Pillars and the Noble Truths of Buddhism. I knew Shakespeare and Donne and Chaucer.

But Spider’s stories made me cry. They made me think. They got me to understand the real application of what the wise had said and written and thought. His stories were parables based on a single brilliant concept all those great writers, philosophers, and religious figures understood but never quite verbalized so succinctly: Shared pain is diminished; shared joy is multiplied.

The central figure in many of his stories is a bartender named Callahan who owns a bar. Every drink is a dollar–and that dollar is refunded to you if you return the glass it came in. Very few glasses are returned. Instead, they become victims of  toasts–the tradition being that any worthy toast should end in the glass crashing into the fireplace.

But the narrator is not Callahan. That task falls on Jake, a man who has lost his whole family to his failed brake job. Once a year, on the anniversary of their death, he makes a toast to them–and to his new family: the regulars at Callahan’s.

When I began advising high school newspapers back in the early ’80s, I was looking for a way to explain what it was I thought a newspaper was supposed to do. The credo of Callahan’s became the credo of all the publications I worked with. It was how we viewed the publication–but it was also how we treated each other. My journalism students and Jane’s science students became the children we knew we would never have–they became family for Jane and for me.

In May of 2010, just as Jane was beginning the long dive into NET/CS, Spider’s wife Jeanne died from a “rare” and “aggressive” bile duct cancer. Given what he had written about her over the years, I know theirs was a profound and deep love that broadened them both. She was a dancer and choreographer who had coauthored a series of books with her husband.

The couple has a single offspring–a daughter–who delivered her first child shortly before Jeanne died. I remember when the daughter was born, Spider wrote a piece that ended with him talking about how he viewed her–that she was a connection to both the future and the past and that, at last, he understood the patience and care his parents had given him.

Tonight I received a post from an old friend whose admiration for Spider is no less than my own. Spider’s daughter has been diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer. Despite its advanced stage, her doctors say her prognosis is good. But Stage IV of any cancer means the patient is in deep water.

Spider’s daughter faces a difficult road.

Spider’s already difficult road is more difficult tonight as he faces the potential loss of his daughter while still dealing with the loss of his wife.

A fund has been set up to help with Terri’s expenses. For those of you on the South Coast, the fundraiser is local on March 2 in Dartmouth, MA. The link will give you the details.

But even if you can’t make a donation, send them both your positive thoughts and positive energies. Say a prayer for them, if that is your way.

There is great pain here that needs to be diminished. Let us share that pain so that theirs is lessened.