I know that money cannot solve all problems, but I do believe it will cure cancer. And so I tip my hat to the people giving their time and money to the Relays for Life taking place across North Carolina this spring. I lost a grandmother, great-grandmother and uncle to cancer. I left my native Stokes County before cancer took its toll on my kin. But I can see the toll on the bodies of the people coming and going from the Johnston Cancer Center in Smithfield.

Cancer makes me mad because it’s arbitrary, killing the young and the old, the strong and the weak, the good and the bad alike. Some diseases, even some cancers, we can blame on how we treat our bodies. But no one did anything to deserve leukemia or breast cancer.

So I’m rooting for the doctors who are trying to make cancer moot. Already, because of treatments developed through research dollars, not all cancers are death sentences. Still, I look forward to the day patients enter a cancer-treatment center with the same nonchalance they enter a flu clinic.

The other day, as I walked past the lobby of the Johnston Cancer Center, I saw a lady wearing a rather fashionable head wrap, her hair obviously lost to treatment. I wish her well. In the meantime, we can improve her chances — and the chances of all cancer patients — by supporting the Relay for Life.