It’s funny how the Internet can make you feel like an intimate friend of someone, even though you’ve never met the person and they don’t know you exist. It can make you feel a part of a family, even if it’s not really yours. That’s how I feel about Leroy Sievers and his blog family.

Sievers writes the “My Cancer” blog for National Public Radio’s website, www.npr.org/blogs/mycancer. He worked for ABC News for a long time, mostly for “Nightline.” He traveled to war zones all over the world, facing death in places I’ve never had any interest in visiting. Now, he’s facing death closer to home.

Six years ago, after a routine colonoscopy, Sievers woke up to find the doctor looking at him uncomfortably. He had colon cancer. He had surgery to remove the colon cancer. He thought he was fine, “the poster child,” as he put it much later, for early detection.

Except that it didn’t work out that way. He was clean for four years, until the cancer came roaring back. It started with slurred speech and a droop in his face that led to the emergency room and surgery for a brain tumor a week later.

In his first broadcast about his cancer, back in February 2006, he is full of vim and vigor, determined to fight the beast, to give it a run for its money. His blog entry in May 2006 is quite a bit different. The cancer has spread to his lungs and his liver. His doctors are trying to poison him to keep him alive. The prognosis is dim: 6 months, 12 months, maybe 20 months. The 20-month estimate is supposed to make him happy. Actually, it’s been 22 months, all told, now, since the cancer came back and Sievers moved into Cancer World.

I don’t live in Cancer World, not every day anyway. But I spent 18 months there with my friend Judy, and have logged too many stints lately, with friends and family. It’s a place most people try to forget. Maybe I’m weird, but I try to remember.

Every morning, Monday through Friday, I wake up to see how Sievers is doing. Monday is particularly worrisome because of the two days that have passed and not knowing what might have happened. He gets a lot of comments every day, from people who live in his world. The regulars update us on their conditions, offer encouragement to each other and, depending on how Sievers is doing, offer prayers for him and his longtime partner, Laurie. I offer my own silent prayers. Sometimes I think about writing in myself, but I’m not quite sure what to say – me, who is never at a loss for words.

We all got nervous when Sievers said he was going to Maui to drink Mai Tais. For months, he’d been writing that when things got really grim, he was going to take off for his last trip to one of his favorite places. But no, he assured us, it didn’t mean he was giving up; he just wanted to go there while he was still feeling well.

This past week has been a tough one for Sievers. After chemo and radiation, and radiofrequency ablation (which I only know about because of Leroy) to kill some tumors in his lungs, he went into the hospital for surgery on his spine, to deal with the tumors that have been causing him so much pain. As his old friend Ted Koppel wrote recently, “This one is hitting him hard.” He had a stroke during the surgery, which has taken away his peripheral vision in one eye, maybe permanently. He can’t drive anymore. According to Ted: “What he finds most difficult to handle, at the moment, is a sense that the downhill slide is gathering momentum and may not be stoppable. That’s a natural fear and will, one of these days, happen.”

Tough to read. Tougher to endure. Laurie blogged about it a few days later: “Sneaky stuff, this cancer … hits you when you’re down. I’m not talking about what it does to the body … I’m talking about what it does to the mind. It hits deepest in the spirit, when reserves are low. Sievers has been in the hospital for a week now with lots of ups and downs.”

Today, I went to chemo with my friend. The chemo room was so crowded that, for half of it, I was in the waiting room because there was just no room in there for visitors. That’s where I saw the young mother in the wheelchair, her own mother giving a bottle to her 3-week-old baby, her husband kneeling by the wheelchair, his arm half around her, rubbing her arm as she sat there crying. It’s not supposed to be that way. The baby should have been in her arms. Sneaky stuff, indeed. Today, I will not complain about anything.

Just before I wrote this, I checked the blog again. Sievers has gone home from the hospital. He’ll be back blogging tomorrow. And, of course, I’ll be checking up on him. I don’t read him every day to learn how to die. That’s not the hard part. I read it to remember how to live.

Susan Estrich is a syndicated columnist and author.