(CNN) -- It's never easy when you get that phone call, even when you've known for years that it might be coming. But on Friday, I got the call that someone I loved had died. Just five days earlier, my friend Marci and I had been making plans for our kids to go trick-or-treating together, and now she's gone. I can't write that Marci Smith lost her battle with brain cancer, because Marci hated that phrase. Her husband, Tim, thinks she just didn't like the concept of losing at anything. Actually, in my book, she beat cancer. Her disease was diagnosed when she was 43, when her son Joshua was 3 years old. Her doctor told her that statistically speaking, she had three to six months to live. That was in February 2007.Marci Smith was one of the first people featured in this columnThe ultimate empowered patient, she diagnosed her own cancerCohen: She beat cancer in how she lived the last 4Â½ years
She'd always wanted to visit all 50 states, and so over the past four years, she and Tim and _ visited the states she hadn't been to yet.