I look in the bathroom mirror, trying to decide if I should trim my hair before it starts to shed. I experiment with the look, plastering down my long, wiry, hair with a wet brush. Jill, a nurse practitioner who'll be monitoring my progress between treatments and prescribing my medications, has told me to expect my hair to start dropping in patches from my head, my brows, my cheeks and my chin within the next fifteen days. As a veteran of chemo put it, "Do yourself a favor, cut it now or wake up every morning with your pillow looking like a house pet."

I know better than to feel sorry for myself, of course. The day I got my diagnosis, Harriet issued a group email to all our friends and they have started coming to the house with prepared meals, words of love and support, and even come to commiserate. More of them than I knew have had cancer or a close acquaintance with it themselves. The subject just never came up. Now that it has, they're generous, even urgent, with advice.

A third email recommends chocolate milkshakes as the one taste sure to get through from the world of flavors I've left behind. And though we've never met, the girlfriend of a friend of a friend writes me a long email on how to find little emotional and physical treats in every day to endure the steady thunderstorm of the drugs. There are enough capitalized words in her note to make me feel she's shouting. I understand why the tone is so insistent. These aren't greeting cards; they're are an invocation of the tribe to share stories of a common journey.

A familiar phrase comes to mind, "Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional." I first heard it at an Al-Anon meeting around the corner from our house. For those not familiar with it, Al-Anon is an outgrowth of Alcoholics Anonymous, focused not on the alcoholic, but on the price family members and friends of alcoholics pay for the unmanageable task of trying to make the alcoholic change. It's not about curing alcoholism, but about mitigating its effects, and recovering the sanity and lovingkindness it tends to destroy. I started attending the meetings with Harriet four years ago in the hope of understanding our son's problems with substance abuse. By then we had sent him to a therapeutic school deep in the woods of Idaho where he attended weekly Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings and where, if things went well, we could fly out to visit him once a month.

Harriet, it seemed, soon got what she needed from the program and stopped attending regularly. By my third meeting, though, I realized the program was speaking directly to me not as a Andrew's father, but as my father's son. There had been no drinking in my family that I can recall, but there it was all the same—the sense of isolation the children of alcoholics often feel, the experience of growing up in a household with few guests and few feelings, the stifling silences about some horrible shame no one was discussing, the gnawing fear that something was taking my parents away from me that I could do nothing to stop. I've remained a regular member of Al-Anon not just to hear my own story and those of others, but to learn how to listen without interruption or judgment—how to express the pain rather than endure alone in suffering.

Feeling grateful for cancer may be going too far, but the way it's been drawing away my powers of resistance could be a blessing in disguise.