I’ve been away from the keys almost all day. I spent much of today drinking coffee and talking with Stephanie L., my sister Ruthie’s chemotherapy buddy. They had cancer at the same time, and got to be good friends in the chemo room at the Baton Rouge General. “We had a chemo party every week,” Stephanie says. I remember from talking to Ruthie during those days how much she loved her chemo buddies, and how much Stephanie in particular meant to her. I interviewed Stephanie for hours for the book I’m planning to write about Ruthie’s life and death with cancer. I learned things I did not know about my sister, and was once again left in awe at her grace and courage.

I’m not going to write much about any of this now, because I’ll want to save it for the book. One thing I will say is that I learned so much more this morning about what it’s like to live with cancer — not just survive with cancer, but to really live. Stephanie is so full of hope — it’s no wonder she and Ruthie were friends — and so articulate about her experiences, that I was inspired even more by the prospect of telling this story, which is also Stephanie’s story, and the story of everyone who walked with Ruthie until the end. Without getting the details of what Stephanie told me today — that’s for later — I can tell you it tracked what the psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 bestseller “Man’s Search For Meaning”:

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity–even under the most difficult circumstances–to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

Do not think that these considerations are unworldly and too far removed from real life. It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

Take the fate of the sick–especially those who are incurable. I once read a letter written by a young invalid, in which he told a friend that he had just found out he would not live for long, that even an operation would be of no help. He wrote further that he remembered a film he had seen in which a man was portrayed who waited for death in a courageous and dignified way. The boy had thought it a great accomplishment to meet death so well. Now–he wrote–fate was offering him a similar chance.

You may think that you have to have endured some great horror like a concentration camp to come by this wisdom. Not so. The punishments of the body and the soul meted out by cancer will do. (“Cancer steals so much, not just from you, but from your family too,” said Stephanie). The main thing I took away from my time with Stephanie today is the need — the chronic need — for hope. Hope is what kept Ruthie going. It’s what keeps Stephanie going. To spend time with her is to know hope.

I had not realized that Stephanie was with Ruthie on the last night of her life. Frail and grasping for breath, Ruthie accepted Stephanie’s invitation to come to a healing prayer service and talk given by Sister Dulce, a Catholic nun and healing mystic in Baton Rouge. Stephanie told me things that happened that night that I hadn’t known. There is so much mystery and beauty in this story, and in our lives.As Wendell Berry puts it, “Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.”

I was about to say that the mysteries and graces surrounding Ruthie’s story are so dense that it’s like something out of a book. And then I thought: it will be.