The message came through on my cell phone just as I settled into my beach chair at Lucy Vincent on Monday. “Dan passed away yesterday . . . so sad,” my friend Juston wrote.

“What?” I replied. “I thought he was doing better. From the cancer?”

“Yes. He didn’t tell anyone he relapsed,” Juston said.

“Goddamn,” I replied.

I first met Dan sometime in January 1996. A friend set us up. He was from the next town over and was friends with my best friend’s cousin. For our first date we went to see the movie 12 Monkeys. A movie is a terrible first date and that movie only made it worse.

On the way home our conversation moved along awkwardly. I asked if I could smoke in his car and he was horrified, but when he dropped me off at my apartment we kissed goodbye. It was not a match made in heaven, we had nothing in common, but when you are 23 you’ll try anything, you don’t over think it. His report back to my friend the next day: “She’s kind of weird.”

I took it as a compliment.

We met up another time that winter. A bunch of us were out at a bar and stumbled back to his apartment. He kissed me again, his bright blue eyes and smile made me forget that he thought I was weird. My friends and I stumbled home and they teased me and we laughed. A few months later I moved out west.

I returned to my hometown six years later and took a job waitressing at a local restaurant. One night after work I ran into Dan while out for drinks with some friends. I saw him looking at me across the bar and before I left he asked for my number.

“I’ll only give to you if you’re going to call,” I said.

A couple of days later he picked me up after my shift and we went to a pub down the road. The conversation was awkward and clunky and I think we both knew, again, that this was not a love connection. I didn’t let him kiss me goodbye because, well, I was 29 now and I thought about things much more than I did years before.

I saw Dan a couple more times over the years. Once I was waitressing at another restaurant in my hometown and he was there with a date, a girlfriend, a fiance. I remember she had bright auburn hair and they looked happy. I pretended I didn’t see him.

The last time I saw him was about three years ago. I was home visiting my family, and while out having dinner Dan walked by the table. Same bright blue eyes, same smile.

“How’s it going?” he said.

“Good,” I replied. I was 40 now, but I giggled like a teenager as he walked away.

Two summers ago my friend Juston told me that Dan was diagnosed with cancer and was not doing well.

“My brother just told me,” he wrote. “I don’t know the details. Very sad. In hospital today. Pancreas.”

My immediate reaction was to go home and see him. I can’t explain why but it felt like the right thing to do.

I checked in with Juston a few months later. “Dan is not doing well,” he said. I hoped for the best.

And then on a chilly Sunday night last November I crossed my arms to warm myself and felt a lump on the side of my breast. It’s the kind of thing where time sort of stops and it feels like you’re watching a movie except that you are the subject. I went to the doctor the next day and she ordered my very first mammogram. One mammogram turned into two, then three, followed by an ultrasound. Two hours later a nurse handed me a phone and said that the radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital wanted to speak with me. A week later, I had a biopsy and learned that I had breast cancer.

I thought of Dan. He was the only peer I knew who had cancer. I messaged Juston a few weeks later.

“Isn’t it crazy that both me and Dan got cancer?”

“Scary,” he wrote. “Reach out to Dan, I think he is doing well. Stay healthy and brave.”

I thought about it, but overwhelmed and consumed by constant appointments and decisions and procedures and treatments and recoveries, I didn’t have the time or energy to make contact. Plus Dan was doing well and I assumed he’d moved past cancer and probably didn’t need that weird girl getting in touch to ask for advice.

On Monday, as I sat in my beach chair at Lucy Vincent absorbing the news of Dan’s passing, everything looked surreal. Children in brightly-colored bathing suits carried boogie boards into the water, a middle-aged man on his cell phone paced back and forth, a beautiful tan couple ran hand-in-hand toward the ocean, diving into the waves.

And there I was too, 11 weeks post chemotherapy, hiding my bald head under my sun hat, digging sore neuropathic feet into the sand, watching the water move in and out while mourning a friend with whom I’d grown up, with whom I had little in common except perhaps the biggest thing that would ever happen to us.

Alison Mead lives in Chilmark and contributes to the Gazette.