Joanie Willis met Lisa Pierot in the courtyard of Sanibel's Community Church. It was 1996, and Lisa had been struggling with Stage 4 breast cancer - aggressive cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes and left her a physical and emotional wreck.

Joanie said "Hi" and reached out to shake hands. Lisa fell directly into Joanie's body, nested into her arms and cried: "I'm going to die."

Joanie declared right back: "Oh, no, you are not."

After that, they were best friends, stuck together. Through Lisa's chemo and stem-cell replacement, through baldness and vomiting, through screaming at each other and holding on to each other, through crying and laughing. Through living.

Because Joanie knew Lisa, from that first moment in the church courtyard. Joanie knew what it was like to survive incredible odds. She beat Stage 4 lung cancer. Since that day, Joanie and Lisa helped each other survive.

On Friday, just hours after Lisa passed away, quietly, in her sleep, after the cancer had infiltrated her liver and her bones, Joanie cried - for her friend and for herself.

"Part of this is so selfish," she said. "It's like, no one else will know what it is like to have cancer. Since I have had it, since I still struggle with blood tests and everything, since we did all of that together..."

For them, cancer was the third member of the trio, the uninvited guest who would sometimes leave but always threaten to return. But cancer did leave for so many wonderful moments. And it was those moments that Joanie remembered most vividly on Friday, when she wrote about her friend:

"I met Lisa 10 years ago, years that seem so fleeting now. Years I want back. Today, all I can remember is the good times. And, man, did we have good times: The trips we took, the 'spa days,' the house decorating, book tours, how she loved to cook for me, gardening together, movies, shopping and our 'soul talks.' Thousands and thousands of soul talks. And politics! We spent an entire week in a cabin in the mountains and sat spellbound watching the Gore/Bush election debacle in 2000. That week she cooked and taught me embroidery, while I cleaned up her trail of messes. We both yelled at the TV. It was one of the best weeks of my life.

"She used to keep a journal of 'Joanieism's' - words or sentences I used that didn't mean what I thought. She never corrected me and found them endearing. Only Lisa would find my ignorance precious. If I said 'that little guy has a Hitler complex,' she would laugh and sneak off to add it to her journal. It was years later that my sister finally told me it wasn't Hitler it was Napoleon.

"Who will I call now after Meet the Press on Sunday? Who will come running to hold me close if we have another 9-11? Who will be just as scared during one of my CAT scans as I am? Who will rein in my anger at unimportant things and take the same amount of joy as I do in the silly and mundane? Who will understand the depth of me?

"We raised our kids through the teenage years, we counseled and consoled. We fought and we loved. Mostly we just loved. We shared the fear of having Stage 4 cancer. No small thing that. The tests, the chemo, the surgeries, the uncertainties, the pain of it all. The loss of trusting the future. But when I tell you that when the needles went into one of us, or we were waiting for results for one of us, or we heard good news or bad news about one of us, we laughed. A lot. Much more than we cried."

Candor and comedy, shared with Post readers

Readers of The Palm Beach Post shared much of the laughing and crying with Lisa Pierot, too. Since October 2001, her column, The Metastatic Life, appeared in the Sunday Accent section.

'You are my heart'