My best friend Jeanne, at 45-years-old, is too young -- much too young -- to have breast cancer. And that’s what she called to tell me. “I have cancer,” she said. Just like that. “I have cancer.”

Those were the first words I heard her say since September. I don’t know how that happened. We used to talk on the phone every week. We talked every day -- no, twice a day -- sometimes three times a day, when we were both newlyweds and our husbands were doing back-to-back deployments.

Jeanne was my first grown up friend. The first friend I didn’t feel like I had to compete with. The first friend who expected me to behave.  Jeanne was the first woman I ever met who really understood what it takes to be a good friend -- and she taught me.

I always count that as one of the best lessons I ever learned in military life. Even though we’ve lived thousands of miles apart for the past 15 years, that friendship has meant that Jeanne was with me when my daughter was born. It meant that I had to be with her at her mother’s funeral.

Now she is telling me that her cancer wasn’t caught early despite her annual mammograms. She says it has spread to her lymph nodes. She will have chemotherapy and radiation. She says she will need lots of phone calls.

And from a thousand miles away I only listen once again while Jeanne gathers her forces -- her own husband and family, certainly. But Jeanne draws the friends that she has made over her whole life -- friends from work and from her daughter’s soccer team. Friends from college and those military years. She even has a friend she has known since toddlerhood. She gathers those connections like threads to spin a cord. Like cords to twist into a rope. Like a rope to tie a knot in and hang on.

That’s what we military spouses need to know. Even though we make and lose track of friends at every duty station, when trouble comes we will still be able to reach back over the miles and gather those old friends back into the cord. Back into the rope. We can tie ourselves to each other firmly, gladly, back into the knot that binds and holds and sustains us all.