I’d like to open with an apology. I’m not going to write anything funny this week. I’m sorry, but some things can’t be mocked. This is the column I’ve wanted to write all quarter, and now that it’s time, I find myself doubting whether I can do it. I don’t think I have the right words. I don’t think there are any.

I’m afraid that what I will write will be trite, afraid that it won’t be taken seriously, afraid that it will, afraid that writing it exposes more of me than I’m willing to let people see. All the same, I’m going to try.

My aunt got cancer a year and a half ago, a pretty nasty one. She was scared, we were scared. There was a lot of surgery and a lot of chemotherapy, and for a while, she was better. We all talked about how lucky we were and how tough she was. We were cautiously optimistic.

Then at Christmas they said she was sick again. They told her she would have to do more chemo.

My aunt is beautiful, all Irish freckles and spiky red hair. But chemo makes your hair fall out. So a week before hers started to, my aunt decided to dye it blue, the same blue as the nurse’s scrubs she wears to work.

She did it, even though it set my grandmother — and probably a few other people not used to seeing a 46-year-old woman with short blue hair — a little on edge. She was still beautiful, all Irish freckles and blue hair. She laughed when it started to fall out and leave weird blue patches all over her head. She was beautiful even then.

One day, when she was all Irish freckles and bald, I asked her why she had dyed it. “I can’t control the cancer,” she told me. “I’ve got to at least have fun with the things I can control.”

I cried when we got off the phone. I cried for her, cried for the grace with which she faced the ordeal ahead, cried because I wished she didn’t need to have that grace. There was a simple wisdom in her words, and it hurt that she was forced to be wise.

Because what she said doesn’t just apply to her. None of us can control the cancer, or the drunk driver that hits our car next Friday, or the heart attack, or the Alzheimer’s that will set in when we’re 60.

So at the risk of being just another clich