On a hot September Monday of 1998, I was climbing the high bridge that ties together the buildings of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), to apply for an MFA, when I experienced dizziness. The height, that never looked so scary to me, felt strangely uncomfortable. It was around 9 in the morning when I was trying to get to admissions for forms and information. A janitor helped me cross the rest of that long bridge to get to the other building. I spent some minutes r

What I remember from cancer, growing up, is that it was a rarer disease. Not something you get from the air, the water, from food or aging. Not, for sure, something babies are born with. So the first time I heard my grandma’s Clara had returning lung cancer I was devastated. The first time she got it was I a baby. My recollection is something small and “simple”: a lump, removed, some chemo, done. Now, more than twenty years later, it was back, and it would kill her at age 74,