Dina Rabinovitch

I started reading Dina Rabinovitch's column in The Guardian supplement G2 a couple of years ago when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer. She used to write every other Wednesday about her experience with unflinching honesty. Sometimes I'd have to put the paper down, look away and skip a few lines when I returned to her piece. Over the next few months, I became familiar with her 3-year old son Elon, her surgeon Dr Dubaisi and her large brood including several step children. She wrote candidly about her efforts to get her son to understand why she could no longer breast feed him (he was 2 1/2 already!), what it was like to lose clumps of hair following chemo and the experience of seeing a flat chest where once there used to be boob. And this morning I woke up to a G2 dedicating their cover article to Dina following her demise yesterday. She was only 44.