It was the kind of news that made me want to scream loudly “This isn’t fair!” But such an emotional outburst would have seemed so childish and out of place in the face of my friend’s quiet dignity and steely courage.

Donna, my oldest friend and one of my dearest, has cancer. Again. She beat it more than a decade ago, and again later. Now it’s back, Stage 4 ovarian this time. She said those horrible words, prefacing them only with “I have some bad news.”

I had called her a while back and we were chatting happily along, easily picking up where we’d left off the last time we talked, around five years ago when I moved to Des Moines. She said it as calmly as if she were telling me that she’d fractured an arm.

She lives near Omaha and we promised to get together. Last weekend, we did. This woman, who has every reason in the world to feel beat down – cheated, in fact – does not. She’s hopeful and cheerful, and if I closed my eyes to the physical toll her disease has taken on her body, the happy lilt in her voice would not betray it.

Donna has that cruel BRCA gene mutation that has riddled so many families – hers especially – and its discovery was many years in the future when we became friends. Strangers, we had been thrown together in a boarding house in college when neither of us had much of an idea who we would become. We became friends quickly and worried about the normal things young women worry about – men, finding room in a thin budget to eat something besides store-brand boxes of macaroni and cheese, clothes.

And our breasts. Were they too small? Too big? Oddly shaped? Did that halter top make them look weird? We took a road trip to Iowa once, and when we crossed the border, Donna, never particularly well-endowed, read the welcome sign proclaiming Iowa “a place to grow,” looked down at her chest and sternly commanded, “Start growing.” What we never worried about was that there was an 85 percent chance one of us would develop breast cancer.

More than 30 years ago when I was away for the first time from the sheltered – too sheltered, perhaps – existence my home offered, Donna taught me a lot about life. I’d never met anyone with so many record albums, most of them by artists I’d never heard of in the shallow AM-radio world I inhabited: seminal pioneers like Bonnie Raitt, Buffalo Springfield, some guy by the name of Eric Clapton, who, as it happened, turned out to be one of the best guitarists of his time and perhaps all time. She also introduced me to some things (read beer) my parents wished she hadn’t, but which I would have discovered eventually in the company of people who didn’t have my best interests in mind. In 1978, she helped me adjust to being motherless, something she’d been doing practically all of her life. Donna’s own mother had died when she was in grade school from the same disease she’s fighting today.

Sometimes, I hear certain inflections in my voice and I realize that they were Donna’s first. She was – and is – that influential in my life. She’s still teaching me. About courage, about the triumph of the human spirit against seemingly insurmountable odds. About taking nothing for granted. About looking at each day as a gift that was never guaranteed.

I will not cry, at least not to her face. If Donna can get through this with laughter and even good humor, the least I can do is hide my tears.