In 2004, there was one other person. I was young and sick and more alone in it than I have ever been able to fully describe. Nobody my age understood. Nobody my age was going through it. I’ve written about how apart I felt in those years, the young cancer patient among peers who were planning weddings and careers while I was planning around scans.

Back then, if you wanted to find someone who understood, you had almost nowhere to look. The internet was chat rooms, and that was about it. And in one of those chat rooms, I found him. A man only slightly older than me, dying, with a wife and children he was going to leave behind. He and the young man I met once in the PET/CT trailer were the only two younger people I encountered in that entire era of my illness. Two people. That was the company available to me in the depths of it. He and I would ask each other the questions no one else could hold. He’d ask me if I was afraid of recurrence, that specific dread only another cancer patient truly understands, the fear that healthy people love you too much to sit with. And I’d ask him the harder one. I’d ask him if he was scared of leaving his family. He told me they would be well taken care of, and that he was at peace. I have carried that for twenty years. A young father, dying, telling a stranger in a chat room that he was at peace, that his people would be okay. We were each other’s only safe place to say the true thing out loud, the two unspeakable questions, are you afraid it comes back and are you afraid to die and leave them. There was nowhere else to ask them and no one else who could answer.

Then my divorce came, and my life went up in flames in a dozen other ways, and I lost contact with him. I never found out for certain what happened. I can only assume he passed, the way he seemed to know he would. He simply slipped out of my life the way so much did in those years, and I was left with the memory of a voice that had understood me completely and then was gone.

For a long time, that was the whole story of finding my people. One man having one conversation that mattered. And then silence. It’s different now. For the last six or eight years, I’ve been more open about my melanoma. Publicly, out loud, on Instagram, where I stopped hiding it and started simply telling the truth about it. Previously I would just post a number each anniversary. It was just a nod to myself and my survival. But then something happened that the thirty-year-old in the chat room could never have imagined. I found my people. Not one of them. Many of them. There is a whole community out there now, and I have met the most extraordinary people in it. Every one of them extraordinary, I mean that. People all over the world, facing every kind of cancer there is, so many of them young, all of us finding each other across oceans and time zones because the technology finally caught up to the loneliness. The thing that took me a chat room and one dying stranger to find in 2004, I can now find any day I open my phone. People who understand the unspeakable questions, who ask them of me and let me ask them back, who get it instantly and completely in a way it once took me years and terrible luck to stumble into even once.

It is a gift. I want to be clear that it is a gift, this ending of a loneliness I carried for so long. But there is a cost folded inside the gift, and I’d be lying if I didn’t name it. When you have many companions in this, you lose many too. In 2004, I had one person who understood, and when he was gone, I grieved one. Now I have a whole world of them, and I love them, and I watch them go. I light candles far too often. I learn names and stories and faces and then I lose them, one after another, because that is what this community is, a group of people bound together precisely by the thing that is trying to take us. The connection and the grief arrived on the same wire. You don’t get one without the other. The alternative is the isolation I remember, and I would not go back to it. I would rather have the whole extraordinary community and all the candles than one voice in the dark and then nothing. But I won’t pretend the candles are easy. They’re not. Some weeks there are too many of them.

Here is the thing. I have spent my whole life feeling apart, on the outside of every circle, the one nobody quite understood. And it was this, the illness that could have isolated me most completely, that finally brought me my people. First one voice in a chat room. Now a community that spans the globe. The very thing that set me apart turned out to be the thing that connected me, in the end, to more understanding than I ever found anywhere else.

I think about that man sometimes, the one from 2004, at peace, sure his family would be okay. I hope he was right. I hope they were. And I hope, wherever the understanding goes when a person carries it out of this world, that he somehow knows he wasn’t the last one after all. That the lonely girl he talked to in a chat room grew up to find a thousand more like him, and loved them, and lit a candle for every one she lost, and kept going. One voice became many. That’s the whole story, really. It just cost more than I knew it would.