My Brain Tumor and Shaun Cassidy
Originally published at https://www.wbur.org on August 1, 2023.
An earnest goal of my young life was to meet Shaun Cassidy. I had no executable plan to make this happen. I believed I’d be walking along someday, and he would appear. And of course, he’d know me, as surely as I knew him.
But in the late 1970s, the closest I ever got to Shaun Cassidy was watching “The Hardy Boys” TV show in which he starred, plastering his posters around my room and listening to his albums fanatically.
In 2020, I revisited my youthful obsession with him. I wrote a piece about him which ran in an online publication. I facetiously told Shaun Cassidy I was sorry I’d neglected to properly break up with him in 1979, but that our fictional relationship was long over. I confessed that maybe I listed him as an emergency card contact, and I was releasing him from that responsibility.
I shared the essay on social media, but I didn’t tag him in any of the posts because that felt a little intrusive to me. But in August 2022, he trended on Twitter. I reposted the article and hashtagged his name. He saw it, and kindly responded.
I was part mortified, part thrilled. He graciously accepted the end of our fictitious relationship and said to say hi to my husband Shawn — I mentioned that I’d married someone with the same…
