Six years ago, I lost a sister to cancer. She was 42, she was loving and she was loved, and then she was gone. Since then I’ve had difficulty reading about the disease. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Emperor of All Maladies” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011; I couldn’t pick it up. John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars” became a phenomenon; I skipped both book and movie. Why invite cancer into my life when it had already broken in?
But when I learned that Stuart Scott had completed a memoir shortly before dying at 49 of appendiceal cancer in January, I knew I would read it. Maybe because I was such a fan of his work on ESPN, with every “boo-yah!” making him as cool as the other side of the pillow. Maybe because my sister had also been in television broadcasting. Maybe because, after another family member was diagnosed and treated last year, I realized that avoiding something doesn’t mean it will avoid you.
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