I walked slowly to my car after meeting Sue Marangi that sunny afternoon more than two years ago. "When she dies," I thought to myself, "I don't know how I will be able to handle it."

You see, she was dying from the moment I met her. And that was what had brought us together. The feisty and fearless Sue had been living with breast cancer for 20 years — and it had finally made its checkmate move, spreading to her bones. I was there as a Baltimore Sun reporter to tell the stories of women, like her, with terminal breast cancer who had entered a vaccine trial at Johns Hopkins Hospital as a last push to stay alive. Filled with hope, they considered the trial their last stab at a miracle. The trial, on the other hand, was just the early stages of science, not guaranteed to extend life, let alone be a cure.

Sue knew the risks — the pain, the sacrifices in time and energy, the low chance of success. But her daddy always told her she would need to leave the world a better place than when she found it. Maybe, by her being a guinea pig in this experimental treatment, some woman who didn't even have breast cancer yet would benefit.

She pretty much expected she would, too. She once told me about a similar trial done with pancreatic cancer patients more than a decade earlier. Three of the original 14 participants were still alive all these years later. She would be one of the three.

Sue and I had just met, but before our first two hours together were up, we had engaged in the most candid conversation about death I had ever had. How often do we really and truly talk openly about death? I remember how she spoke disparagingly about chemotherapy. She'd watched a friend suffer through the indignities of chemo, the pain and suffering of the treatment seemingly worse than the disease. Not for me, she declared. She would fight the disease her way, but when it got too bad, she would go quietly and make her last months as pleasant and peaceful as possible. She had even planned her memorial service and the place off Cape Cod where she wanted her ashes scattered — after her friends placed the urn atop her favorite bar and toasted her.

She was only sorry she'd miss the party.

Sue was sassy and straight-forward. She used to refer to herself and the other women she'd met in the trial as the "almost dead." She chose to concentrate on the "almost" part. When one woman kept focusing on the next trial and the one after that, seemingly desperate to stay alive, Sue faced her fate. When she met other breast cancer survivors who wanted to talk about cancer, cancer, cancer all the time, she would try to change the subject or be busy the next time she was invited along. She saw no use in allowing cancer to define her. She insisted she had no regrets in her life.

One thing she always wanted was to know as much as she could about the trial she had enrolled in, though information about an ongoing clinical trial is close to impossible to come by. In a moment of frustration, she once lashed out: "If this thing isn't working, tell me so I can go out and find something else. I won't get angry, but I need to find something else that will."

I often wondered why people like Sue let people like me into their lives the way they did. As a reporter, I would call on the phone or knock on the door, and many times, more often than not, people would answer my most intimate questions. I spent that summer really getting to know Sue. I was with her when she got the good news that her cancer had slowed — and then, again, two months later when terrible back pain landed her in the hospital with what turned out to be the cancer roaring back.

For the two-plus years since, we would speak about her death as if it were the weather outside. I was afraid, but she never was. I would tear up, feel my heart ache when things sounded bad. She would be strong.

Sue died on Sept. 30; she was 62.

After I left the Sun a year ago for a new career, Sue lamented that no one would be at the paper to write about her when she was gone. She was worried she wouldn't get the send-off received by others featured in the series, "The Trial of Their Lives." She worried no one would remember her.

I promised her I would make sure no one ever forgot.

Stephanie Desmon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, is senior media relations representative for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Her e-mail is sdesmon1@jhmi.edu.