Other Funny Stories About Cancer by Brian Lobel

Is it inappropriate to talk about the virginity of someone who’s dead? I’m pretty sure Lina would, in fact, mind and most likely be offended – she barely spoke. She was shy about her heavy Russian accent, so she just spent her time with her violin.

Lina used to dance with me in Tzamarot, an Israeli folk dance troupe that was the center of my high school social life. It was rampantly queer (without knowing it), unabashedly Zionist (and proud of it), and every Wednesday from 8-9:30. I don’t know why Lina was in the class – she hated dancing and the ridiculous girls in the class… but it was our social life, a place where intermingling was expected and enforced.

I found her fascinating. Maybe it was her accent, or the fact that she was a brilliant violinist who was stand partners with my high school idol Calvin, our superstar in math and physics. I don’t know what it was, but we became fast friends. Fast friends? Acquaintances, really. We e-mailed and saw each other when I came home from Ann Arbor… and then one day she had cancer. A bad cancer.

My mother called me and told me. Since my mom wasn’t working, she had offered to drive Lina to and from treatments, which they all knew would never help. I called once or twice – we weren’t best friends - I think I sent her a stuffed animal which I later saw on her rack of small stuffed animals that were also the presents of other well-meaning clueless empathizers. This was, by the way, months before my testicular cancer diagnosis, so I was still a newbie to cancer empathy.

When I finally got to see her - her house smelled stale and death-filled, and her neck: her neck was no longer there. The freak esophageal tumor bulged like a Seinfeld-ian joke, but it wasn’t funny, it was going to kill her. I was 19, not a bereavement counselor, so we just sat and talked about music, classes and her comfort. Thankfully, I’m arrogant enough to fill conversation with things about me, as she was “doing” very little. I went every few days for a few weeks. Then one day, when the stale smell was almost overwhelming, I noticed that a fog of death had preemptively set. It was a feeling my mother always tried to air out of her car by rolling down the windows after she would drop Lina home from the hospital – a palpable feeling of mortality.

I knew this was it – so I decided to reach across the divide between life and death and I’m pretty sure I mis-kissed Lina on the lips. It was nothing, devoid of sexual energy or anything other than simple interpersonal connection; a drop of her sweat lingered on my upper lip. With that drop, the thought flashed through my head: Unless Lina was a closeted freak or shamed sado-masochist, she was assuredly going to die without sex. Or maybe she had had sex. Maybe I just didn’t know about it because she’s discreet and we weren’t best friends, maybe she had. I hope she had had – or I guess I don’t really care if she had had, at least not in the way others later cared about me dying a virgin. If she cared or not, no one would ever know – only survivors get to tell their stories.

Whether or not I died a virgin was the first thing to enter Raquelle’s mind – Raquelle who had come to make me come before I left Michigan to start my chemotherapy, afraid I would never come again. As if penetration were a proper part of my last rites. As if penetration were a proper part of everyone’s last rites. Is it inappropriate to talk about the virginity of a girl no longer living?

At the time, the last drop of sweat stayed on my upper lip – I couldn’t wipe her away. I just wanted to wait until Lina had evaporated and I was once again free from her mortality. And Lina, the presumed virgin, died the next morning.