Cancer widowed Mary Karpowicz, and then came back for her. The doctor looked at the lump in her mouth and blurted, "Mary, you have cancer!" Mary is my mother's mother, born seven months before the 1918 World Series. She lives alone in a big house on top of a hill, and knits — hats, mostly, these days. She gives away what she can, but her fingers outknit her generosity. Her dresser drawers overflow with knitted winter hats.

Mary is unique in our family. She was around the last time that the Boston Red Sox were world champions. And she was the first to beat cancer. Cancer is a malfunction of human machinery, nothing more. That's a fact easy for the intellect, but hard on the heart.

Cancer killed just about everyone in my family who has died in my lifetime. I see cancer as a collector of lives, who calculates its attacks like some Nazi general. I think of my father, ashen after leaving his father's sickbed, admitting to his brother: "Maybe it would be best if the Lord would take Pop." And I think of my father's mother. Cancer came for her right after it took her husband. She was still weak from her loss, and her struggle was brief. There were others, spread out along the family tree. And then Mary's husband, William, a shop worker who retired at 65, got sick at 67 and died in agony at 69.

And then it came for Mary. She was the oldest. It would assume that she was the weakest. But Mary won. We don't know how. Good doctors? Plates of pickled eggs and Polish kielbasa? Or maybe she's just tougher than she looks. A year later, Mary led the first lap of the cancer survivor's walk at the local college track. She felt so good that she took a second lap. Mary's victory changed everything. What had been a slaughter became a fight.

Cancer struck back immediately on two fronts - at my father and at his brother. The news disturbed us, but gone was the liquid dread that pools like mercury in your stomach, heavy and poisonous. My father won. His brother won.

And now, like an enemy on the run, blind with desperation, it has struck for my brother. My little brother. It seems a foolish attack; my brother, at 25, is too young, too healthy, too strong. And things are different now. Ever since cancer got whipped by an old Polish lady who lives alone on top of a hill, still knitting, knitting, knitting her winter hats.

— Mark Arsenault