On March tenth, near three in the morning, Bob, sleeping in a lounge chair beside his daughter’s bed, was awakened. The room was quiet, but something had changed. Nur’s breathing had slowed. Her face seemed to be fading. He gathered the family and, once assembled, as if she were waiting, she let go a small and peaceful sigh, and was gone.

I first met Nur three years ago when I joined a wellness group, a small band of cancer patients traveling in this lifeboat we agreed upon, a lifeboat of an hour and a half a week where we pulled each other on board from this dark ocean we were drifting in and briefly held. I had just received my first chemo treatment, which was horrific and botched. I was traumatized and terrified to continue, terrified to stop.

But this is about Nur. She had cancer, and somehow she found extraordinary courage without minimizing the deep plethora of human mood that was her. She lived fully and longer than anyone ever expected. Still, that doesn’t say enough, doesn’t address the lesson of Nur, the gift of Nur, the ache that is her absence.

For one of those years, she wheelchaired to two of my classes and changed the lives of my students simply by being present, never focusing on herself, never hiding the struggle she was waging. She had a thousand things she wanted to do and, in spite of a dark underlining which was always much too critical of her own limitations, she continued to work, to be a single mother to two sons, continued to write her poems, and take her chemo. We all grew accustomed to her routines of survival and looked on in mute awe as she would inject herself with treatment after treatment while talking from her heart, fully engaged in another’s moment of fear or frustration.

During this last year, there were times she began to feel herself pulling away from the mainstream of life. She resented it. And though her parents were devoted to keeping her mobile, she began to envy the things non-cancer people take for granted, like walking to the mailbox, and chewing large overflowing sandwiches, and going to the movies. But through the full disclosure and animation of whatever was rising through her spirit, Nur kept returning to a center that seemed a bit calmer for each journey there, a bit brighter for each stumble into darkness.