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My mom called me yesterday morning and told me she saw in the obituaries that the sister of a friend of mine from high school had just died. My friend was the oldest of four girls. Her mom died of cancer while she was in college, and her dad remarried shortly after that.

Her sister, who was 29, died yesterday. I knew she was ill. She had been living in a Hospice. She developed aggressive brain cancer of some sort last summer. I think she had her birthday in the past couple months. My friend would drive home to Lansing from the Detroit area (about 1 1/2 hours away) every week or so. She had taken over keeping her sisters fingernails looking good. She told me her sister would have wanted them kept even if she had been able to say so or do it herself. Her nails were not fancy. Simply tidy and even.

Before her illness, she was a classical musician, opera coach, and other such musical things and had been teaching at the University of Tennessee. She could play piano and organ and many other things I can only dream of (can't carry a tune or read music).

I need to send my friend a card and another to her dad and stepmom and then make a donation in her sisters name to the Hospice. I grew up in the same neighborhood with my friend and her family. I remember sitting in my yard and watching her mom out pushing the stroller with the latest baby in it and a couple girls dragging behind (my friend and her sister who is my brother's age) past my house as we were growing up. It was stunning to have her mom die so young, but now her sister has died at a much younger age.

Once I babysat for the two younger sisters, and while I was there, I taught the little girls how to flip over the Fisher Price little people slide and use it to catapult the little people around the room (no surprise I never was asked back--but to be fair to myself, they had two older girls old enough to watch the younger ones).

I haven't said anything about this to my friend because I think it would be rude and would serve no purpose, but I wonder if my friend is concerned about her own health. I would think it was genetic to have fatal cancer at young and younger ages in one's family. This family didn't drink, smoke, etc. They were proud members (and strict) of a local Baptist church.