Although we shared the same middle name and the same DNA, it took 11 years for us to meet.

She was the elusive second cousin I referred to in doctors’ appointments when discussing the mutated gene dotting my family tree. The one my Grandmother told me about over cups of steaming tea on Sunday mornings. The one I thought of with every trip into the depths of the MRI machine.

Donna blazed a trail for me. She faced breast cancer and won. Had a wonderful husband who loved her through it. Went on to have a beautiful baby girl. As I looked over my shoulder – desperate to outrun cancer – her story gave me solace. Even if cancer caught me, maybe I would still be ok.

I was diagnosed in 2009. With no pre-tense of having the answers, Donna emailed me and offered support. In the course of a 30-minute phone call on the night before my first round of chemotherapy, she crossed the divide from stranger to friend. She laughed when she told me that she had hoped for the super model chemo diet, but instead gained weight because Big Macs seemed to be the only thing to quell the nausea. She didn’t take away my fears, but she made being young, bald, and sick feel less alien.

Our next phone call came on the eve of my double mastectomy. Consumed by fear of the pain and how my mangled body might appear, I couldn’t articulate the swirl of rage and terror to anyone else. No one got it. Except Donna. She walked me through “what to expect when expecting your breasts to be removed” in a time when my friends were all reading, “What to expect when you’re expecting”.

Then came my final surgery. Finally – freedom from the hold breast cancer had on me for 10 years! Before I recovered enough to pick up the phone, she emailed me with this news: I now have ovarian cancer, Stage 3C, aggressive. I was devastated.

A thief. Cancer once again slipped in, but this time it robbed her of her future. While my world expanded, hers contracted. 

For the next four years, we would trade between counsellor and counselled. In those moments when she thought her days were numbered, I would swear that she would beat the odds. Emerge victorious. Her health would stabilize and she would join me for an Odyssey Program in India. She would go back to work. Plan family vacations. See her daughter graduate, get married, and have audacious dreams of her own.

Instead she got stolen memories. Restricted possibilities. Short respites between endless bouts of treatment.

A month ago I flew in to see Donna on my way to a conference in Chicago. Even fatigued from a raging infection and imprisoned in her hospital bed, she wanted to hear all of the updates from A Fresh Chapter. What I was dreaming about. Where we would launch our next program.

As I filled her in on plans for Cape Town in November and an expansion opportunity in Peru, she shook her head like she always did, “I don’t know how you do it, Terri. Listening to you makes me tired.”

What I couldn’t say was that I was doing it for both of us.

When I reached down to wrap my arms around her feather-like shoulder blades, I knew it was goodbye. She knew it too.

On Sunday, I heard the news. My friend. My cousin. My guide through life with cancer. She has now blazed a trail from this world to the next.

I will miss her forever and carry her with me always.

The hand she reached out during my darkest hours did more for me than she will ever know. Donna would be the first to say that those calls to me were no big deal. But, it is the “little things” that transform lives. It was only because she showed up for me that I am able to show up for the people of our tribe. A Fresh Chapter and the lives we will continue to touch will always be a piece of Donna’s legacy.