Cancer seems to have deep roots in my family's genetic history. The genetic predisposition seems to be there, but there are also environmental issues; often cancer needs a little bit of help to get along. Harmful habits, unfortunate circumstances and old age can each be of use to death. And my father, from a very  young age, unknowingly gave it plenty of help. As a child of thirteen, wandering the streets of Warsaw as an orphan, he found that used cigarette stubs he would find abandoned would assuage the pangs of hunger.

My father, my mother; myself, my sister

As an adult, living in Canada, a land of plenty, he never had to search desperately for food, and he was able to acquire his own cigarettes, even taking to rolling his own as a point of pride. He wasn't quite certain how old he was. We assumed, from what he thought was the correct date, that he was 54 when he died. He had struggled for years with cancer, even surrendered to giving up smoking, until his very last months of life, when he resumed with a metaphorical shrug, until he became comatose, and met death stridently advancing toward him.

His youngest son had an appointment with that same unmerciful angel with a skull's head and a smirk. He bested his father by eleven years. It was not tobacco per se, but smoking pot that my brother had invested recreational pleasure in. He too began at a young age, but older than my father had done, and in far different circumstances; in his first years at university. My mother informed me once that she knew something was afoot because she could smell "LDS" up on the third floor where my brother had his room, 40 years ago. I doubt it comforted her that when my brother threw occasional parties up there, both students and profs would attend and the odour of skunk was prevalent.

My brother, 13 years my junior

Once, when my cousin and his mother, my mother's older sister were visiting and staying over with us, my cousin discreetly took leave of us and my husband accompanying him went out for a walk, to allow him the opportunity to smoke some weed. He too died surprisingly young of cancer, about 20 years ago.

My father's cancer of the throat resulted in disfiguring surgery he was very conscious and aggravated about. When he was taking new experimental chemotherapy sessions by choice as a guinea pig since few other options were left to him those fifty years ago, he spoke darkly to me about "what it's like to die", informing me he didn't want to die, had no intention of dying. But he did.

As for my brother, directly after diagnosis for a rampaging cancer that had given no clue it was present; no feelings of discomfort, illness; he was placed directly into palliative care. No surgery was possible, it was simply too advanced and too busy replicating itself elsewhere in his body, having begun in his abdominal cavity. He did undergo chemotherapy in a last desperate bid to prolong his life, and allow him some quality time with his wife who nursed him at home to the very end. Which didn't take very long; he was gone in months.

Left: my aunt .. Right: my mother

As for my mother, she had two bouts of colorectal cancer. And it was not the cancer that killed her at age 84, but advanced frontal lobe dementia. Her older sister, the mother of my cousin who also died of cancer, was in the same facility as my mother and for the same reason, although my mother predeceased her by several years.

And now, news from family living in the U.S. that those two sisters' older sister in a family of three daughters and two sons living in the Pale of Settlement, Russia -- with only the daughters spared death during the Russian Revolution -- that her oldest son has just died, of an advanced brain tumour, diagnosed a mere several months earlier. He, at least, was 86.