it so much harder than me.” She needed you to hear you say that no one had suffered like she had.

And for all the time that I knew her, I genuinely believed her struggles to be true, and on top of that her family situation seemed desperate. She told me that her relationship with her mother was strained and with her father nonexistent (she spoke positively about her younger sister and then later her niece and nephew). She described him to me quite dismissively as her “biological father” or “birth father” and said that their troubled relationship started when she was a child. Chaya told me that Child Protective Services had removed her from her parents’ home, and during the course of being raised by her ultra-Orthodox grandparents,a lie. He even sent me a video of himself smashing one of the items, a framed piece of artwork. Jeremy said he felt a bit better after he did that.

Another feeling he experienced was relief. In an email, Jeremy told me, “I felt relieved that I no longer had to care for her, without the guilt that one would usually have to struggle with for feeling relief at the loss of a friend since she hadn’t really died.”

***

In the weeks that followed, I heard more stories about Chaya from others who had known her. We traced the origin of her cancer story to at least 2008, when she first began telling people that she had previously had cancer, just as she did that day with me on