Doctors discovered that Julie Danielson had polio when she was in 8th grade at Southwestern Central High School. At the time, the disease infected tens of thousands of children in the United States every year, permanently disabling many of them.

Julie left school for treatment (and eventually she’d have to have her back fused in eleven places), but her absence didn’t go unnoticed. The guy sitting behind her in math class noticed she came back to school in a steel brace.

That guy would one day become her husband.

Maybe Julie started looking for her second mountain then, because after she got well and married Henry Danielson, they set off for the Peace Corps in Africa, teaching high school on a 3 by 5 mile island on Lake Malawi in Central Africa. Julie’s husband Hank writes that the island had no police, no civil authority- it was just he and Julie on a tropical island with 80 amazing kids, many of whom had never seen an automobile. “Oh, there were deadly snakes and crocodiles along with monkeys, and the 5,000 island residents,” Hank writes.

The thing about second mountains is that the undertaking is not a pursuit to please the self. The kind of thinking “do what feels good” came out of the 1960’s when people rebelled against the conformity of the ’50s. Second mountains are different — they’re more about shooting for meaning and moral joy. The magazines we page through want us to ask “What can I do to make myself happy?” but people on their second mountain glimpse something bigger than personal happiness.

Maybe after facing polio, Julie was already feeling a need to transcend the normality of everyday life, and search for joy-a word having nothing to do with personal happiness. Happiness usually refers to some victory for the self while joy means a transformation of self-a fuller and richer state beyond happiness. By all accounts, serving and helping others often makes for a richer, more joyful life.

When they returned to the Jamestown area after the Peace Corps, both Julie and Henry got teaching jobs and settled in, but at 44, Julie was diagnosed with breast cancer. What I sense in their story is that there was never a “why me?” moment for her. She didn’t say, “I already overcame polio, so I’m now safe from life’s travails.” She only missed one day of teaching as she endured chemo and radiation.

The Danielson’s seemed to dig in here, determined to live a life defined by exploration and co-creation. They skied in the winter months and sailed the Great Lakes when the weather was good. Most impressively, after retiring from teaching, they sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to England in their 35-foot sailboat– a whole other mountain in itself.

Sixteen years after her first breast cancer diagnosis, Julie was diagnosed with breast cancer yet again, and further down the road, esophageal cancer made an appearance in her life, and this is the point in the story where I find awe creeping in. Three times in the ring with cancer, a bout with polio, and yet her response was to widen the boundaries of her life, to travel and play with people from different cultures — Egypt, Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon. Not defined by her health, but rather defined by the self, her life was about creating moments rather than dwelling on them.

“The mind has a great deal to do with healing,” Henry writes.

Central to this story is what I will venture to say is a happy marriage-an important element in living for those that choose that path. People in long, happy marriages seem to thrive in sickness and in health. They live on their own shore, grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Sometimes marriage acts as a buffer to life’s unpredictable winds.

Henry wrote the couple’s story to me in a long letter, and I was almost afraid to reach the end. What happened to Julie? I wondered. How does the story end?

And then there was this:

“Today, Julie is outside working on the lawn. She rides nearly 100 miles each week during our winters in Florida and she and I teach sailing for a week each summer in Dunkirk. We will celebrate 52 years of marriage next week.”

What a lovely story.

Not all second mountain stories are as exotic, as adventurous and interesting. But the heart of such stories is what happens on the inside to those who find themselves in a valley at some point in their life.

Some live with anger and regret, while others see adversity and clashes with death as an opportunity to change their perspective, to cultivate complexity and find a deeper, more intricate approach to living.

Thank you to everyone who wrote to share their stories, their personal brushes with cancer or that of a loved one. More and more I see that cancer is an issue that faithfully ties and binds us all together.