My legs are tired this morning after last night’s Relay for Life at Bridgewater State University. It was an emotional night–these things usually are for me.

At the beginning of the Luminaria Ceremony, a 21-year-old talked about his father’s death this past December. The young man had lost his mother when he was seven and found himself his father’s primary support over the last 18 months of his life. I was 58 when Jane got sick. I was still 58 when we buried her. I know what the physical and emotional toll were–and I would never inflict that price on a 20-21 year old.

When I was in college, Ali McGraw starred in a film called “Love Story.” It was about a young couple and how they met and how they got married. Then, with their marriage still very young, McGraw’s character is diagnosed with cancer. At the time, I thought the film was awful–but most people were completely enthralled by the beautiful love story and its tragic ending.

I said at the time I had never seen a healthier looking dead person.

As much as I hated the film then, I hate it even more now. It paints such a romantic picture of death by cancer. And there is nothing romantic about the subject at all. It is an ugly and debilitating death that strips the victim of every dignity and leaves behind an empty, gnawed raw husk of a body that has had every reserve exhausted–a body that has devoured itself in a final effort to sustain itself–an effort that has benefited the cancer more than it has the patient.

And to watch someone you love die that way changes you–burns your own life down to its essentials. There is none of that in “Love Story” either. The author of the book the film was based on–a professor at Yale–later wrote a sequel about McGraw’s husband called “Oliver’s Story.” I can’t imagine he got that story any more right than he got the original–which I read at one point to try to figure out what had made it so successful.

As the student talked about his father’s death, my mind remembered Jane’s. I cried, I walked the Luminaria lap, I found the Luminaria I had made for Jane and bent down to touch it as I walked by. It was standing alone with a greater space between it and the bags to either side of it–as though she knew I would be looking for it.

And as I walked, the pendulum in my mind swung from the pain of sorrow and the pain of anger over and over again.

When I was in graduate school, we lost a student one November night. He had been out riding his bike and been hit by a pick-up truck. I remember wondering what kind of sadist God was to take that young and gifted teacher out of the world.

That death was quick and clean. Death from cancer is anything but. To experience it with someone you love is brutal–both for the one dying and the one left behind. And no novel or film can tell either story.