My soul is tormented

My soul was gripped or should I say ripped yesterday by the clutches of that demon named "Cancer". How I hate that devil. No one is safe from its reaches. I danced with him over ten years ago and now he has returned to claim yet another dance partner...my sweet soul cousin. We rode bikes together. He, my 'little' cousin, taught me how to hit monkey balls with a baseball bat. He made his friends include me in their baseball games even though they did not want to play with a girl. I wrote on his back and he wrote of mine as we deciphered alphabet letters instead of going to sleep. It's a "B"...No...Erase Erase, start over. No it's my turn." We grew up together. He had a bunny rabbit cake for his 3rd birthday when I was 5. We shrieked whenever his great grandma threw her loose string lasso out on the tar roof of her 2nd floor apartment to catch those trusting pigeons she fed everyday. We knew where those 'little' chicken legs came from she invited us up to eat later in the day. She shook them at us with a grimaced face spouting out some form of Italian outrage. We flew down those stairs and out the front door just like the pigeons.
No more pigeons these days. No more old grimacing grandmas. Just that deadly face of our new buddy "Cancer"...yep, that's his name.
I found out yesterday that my sweet cousin is beset with stage 3 (plus a whole lot of letters and numbers after the 3) prostate cancer. This should not be. It is not for him. It was OK with me. I came through mine bald but illuminated. Of course! How else would anyone be after 36 radiation treatments. He jokes that he too will glow in the dark. He says that he has found new freedoms; he drives as fast as he wants; he drinks red wine every night; and he shovels his neighbor's driveway just to show him that he is not dead yet.
I found out yesterday that he and I are made of the same courageous, valiant stock...We can face our life and our death straight on...that he and I can do that devil dance boogaloo....and that we can look into grimacing faces that spout cancerous outrages and fly.