When cancer hits your classmates, the numbers become faces

I graduated in 1990. There were 90 of us in that class. Fifty five were girls. We were kids who shared classrooms, lockers, bus rides and playgrounds. We grew up together in a place where faces stay familiar and names carry stories.

In recent weeks, I have lost two classmates to cancer. Both deaths came close together. Too close. It stopped me in my tracks and forced a question I had not wanted to ask.

How many of us has cancer touched already.

To my knowledge, eight of the women from my graduating class have now been diagnosed with cancer. Three of us are gone. I am one of the eight.

That number feels heavy. It feels high. It feels frightening.

Cancer is a terrifying word when it is spoken about in general terms. It becomes something else entirely when it is personal. When it is your own diagnosis. When it is someone you sat beside in kindergarten. When it is a familiar laugh, a face you recognize in old class photos, a life that still felt mid story.

I wanted to understand whether what my classmates and I are experiencing is unusual or simply part of a larger picture. I tried to find Canadian statistics that break down how many women in their late forties and early fifties have been diagnosed with cancer. Surprisingly, those age specific numbers are not readily available in a clear and simple form.

So I looked to our neighbours to the south.

According to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, about 5.2 per cent of adults ages 45 to 54 report having ever been diagnosed with cancer. That figure reflects people who are living with cancer or who have had cancer in the past. It is not a lifetime risk. It is a snapshot at that stage of life.

In my graduating class, eight out of 55 women have had cancer by about age 53, roughly 14.5 per cent.

I am not a statistician. I am not suggesting this proves anything definitive. Small sample sizes matter, and chance always plays a role, especially in small communities. But even with those caveats, that comparison is sobering.

What is more sobering is the human side of it.

In a small town, cancer is not abstract. It is not just a number in a report or a name in an obituary column. It is someone you shared a desk with. Someone whose parents you know. Someone whose kids went to school with yours. It is memories layered on top of loss.

Watching people you have known since childhood die from cancer in what still feels like the prime of their lives is profoundly unsettling. It forces you to confront your own vulnerability and the fragility of the people you thought would always be there.

I know this first-hand because I have had cancer too. I know the fear that comes with that diagnosis. The waiting. The scans. The quiet moments where your mind runs ahead of the facts. It changes how you see your body and how you measure time.

Maybe this story hits harder in a small community because there is no distance. There is no anonymity. The losses ripple outward, touching classrooms, workplaces, families and memories all at once.

Eight women. Three gone. Fifty five girls who once stood together at graduation believing, as most young people do, that serious illness was something far off in the future.

I do not have answers. But I think it matters to say this out loud. To acknowledge the fear. To acknowledge the grief. To acknowledge that when numbers start turning into faces, it changes how we understand them.

Cancer is common. That is what the statistics tell us. But common does not mean normal. And it does not mean we should stop being shaken when it shows up again and again among people we love.

Sometimes an editorial is not about conclusions or policy or solutions.

Sometimes it is about bearing witness.

This is one of those times.