Edgar Allan Poe was one unhappy man. Tuberculosis had wiped out most of the people he loved. His mother succumbed when he was a child. His brother and step-mother were taken by the disease a short time later. And of course, the final agony was the death of Poe’s beloved bride, Virginia.

The ravages of tuberculosis – the Red Death – shaped the writer’s life and drove him to madness and drink. It was a plague that picked its victims without reason and destroyed them in the most miserable fashion.

Imagine if Poe had lived long enough to see the astounding rise of an even more prevalent and wretched disease: a diabolical plague called cancer.

Cancer is vile. Cancer is evil. Both understatements, I know. The disease is cruel and sly and entirely indiscriminate. It’s a bully in the world of physical health. Some of the best people I’ve known have died from it and died horribly. Others are still lingering in a day-to-day, unpredictable battle with the most vicious of afflictions.

My wife was diagnosed shortly before we got together. She survived her treatments, but the chance of a recurrence is a white-knuckle agony we get to think about for the rest of our lives.

Two summers ago, a favorite aunt passed away after years of struggling against the dread disease. It slunk in and refused to leave, eventually taking over most of her body. It finally wore her down.

I grew up next to a couple whom I consider surrogate parents. During the past decade, each of them has suffered from the heartless destruction of cancer. Ray had it in his neck and jaw. Shirley has had it just about everywhere, including the brain and now her lungs. For every good day, months of bad news and painful treatments followed. One week he would be in the hospital. The next week, she would be there. The couple suffered like Job in the Bible – completely and inexplicably.

Ray died two weeks ago. The day of the viewing, I visited Shirley in the cancer ward on my way to the funeral home.

A popular editor at the paper died a short time ago just a year after she was diagnosed with cancer. She was a young, vivacious woman with a wicked sense of humor. One day she was in the newsroom editing copy and cracking jokes. The next day we all learned she had been stricken. Over the months, she got better, got worse. Better and worse. Things looked up, cancer took her down again. Now, another great person is dead and it’s a struggle to fathom.

Cancer. Cruel and sly, like the most heartless sniper with tumors instead of bullets.

A few years ago, I dated a girl whose father I became fond of. He was a spry and happy man who liked to tackle impossible projects around his well-kept house. No matter what he was doing, he wore safety goggles. Fit as a fiddle with not one unhealthy habit. Smart as anyone and a voracious reader.

One day he went for a walk around his quiet, friendly neighborhood. He couldn’t find his way back.

When the doctors examined him, what they found was a tumor nearly the size of an egg in his brain. Soon, this friendly, funny and brilliant man was confined to a bed. He could do nothing for himself. He could no longer read. Weeks after that fateful walk around the block, his family was in vigil. It was a short one. Cancer tore down another victim whom no living person would ever wish to harm.

These are relatively young people. None much older than 60, many much younger. Cancer is not just for the old any more. Cancer these days is for anyone.

Presently, a dozen people I know personally or professionally are afflicted with the curse of cancer. Some have not yet reached their 30s.

And yet, I am not just eerily acquainted with an inordinate number of cancer victims. There is nothing unusual about this at all. How many of you don’t know someone suffering from this despicable disease? Count on your fingers. How many friends, or friends of friends, have fallen? Everybody, it seems, has lost someone. Or is losing someone.

People who live healthy, wholesome lives are ripped apart by the disease. Some children become afflicted while they’re still running playgrounds and skinning knees. Cancer can take anyone and control any part of the body with its evil eggs – any organ, any stretch of flesh. Cancer can take your very bones. The victims may linger for years, or be gone in weeks. They are snatched from their happy worlds by invaders from within.

Tuberculosis, Poe’s nemesis, ravaged the world’s population for hundreds of years. Then, through better living conditions and medical advances, it declined sharply in the early 20th century. Though still a nasty affliction, you rarely hear of it anymore.

Who predicts a similar fate for cancer? Who expects to see the numbers fall through a “eureka” moment in medical science or a simple shift in biology? Nobody. Nobody at all. Physicians work and work, experiment and experiment. Yet you hear of more victims every day.

Wives, brothers, sisters and fathers will continue to deteriorate. Some will perish wearing the shocked looks of those who cannot believe what fate has come to them. We will mourn the lost, wish the best for the survivors and cross our fingers for those who have so far evaded the scourge.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.