Modern Love · The New York Times

Finding the Magic, Just in Time (Encore)

December 3, 2025·41 min·2 clips

At 52, Claire was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, a rare and aggressive form that made her fall in love with life.

Host Anna Martin opens by reintroducing a favorite episode recorded nearly a year earlier, promising a sweet update at the end. Claire Corey grew up the oldest of seven children on a farm in Montana, a self-described hopeless romantic who imagined a future husband named Jim. In her 20s she came close to marrying a man named Roger, but weeks before the wedding he called it off, later telling her they were 'missing the magic.' Shortly after, Claire met Don at a professional training, and describes those weeks as among the best of her life — a relationship she calls genuinely magical. That relationship ended through lost correspondence in the pre-email era, leaving Claire deeply heartbroken. Over the following decade she dated but found nothing lasting, and by her mid-40s she consciously shifted her identity from someone seeking a partner to a career-focused person. She describes releasing that hope as leaving 'claw marks' on everything she let go of, and stuffing hope into a basket she could never quite keep shut. At 50, traveling to Europe for the first time, she felt her life was full and wide open. Just after turning 52, she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, the most aggressive form, which visibly disfigured her breast and forced her to live day by day. When her cancer progressed to stage four, she came home and catalogued everything she would miss — sunrises, colleagues, nieces and nephews — and arrived at a profound love for life itself, which she wrote about in a Modern Love column essay. That essay, she believed, was the end of her romantic story. Then Don, now living in Arizona after relocating partly at her encouragement, invited her to dinner. Claire nervously called him to ask him to her office Christmas party, feeling like a teenager at a Sadie Hawkins dance. He said yes. Don moved to Arizona, and Claire stocked his empty house before he arrived, hanging a shower curtain on Valentine's Day. A visit to Butterfly Wonderland shifted the energy between them, and within days they acknowledged the romance. Don began cooking for her — sloppy joes and kielbasa — and staying with her through hospitalizations, sleeping in a chair. When brain metastasis was confirmed, Claire's sister delivered the news in the hospital garden; moments later, the elevator opened and Don appeared, having returned on his own. Claire reflects that she never expected to want company so much, and that sharing life's ups and downs with someone is far more joyful than she anticipated. She reads her published essay aloud — written before Don's return — and its final line, 'Not yet, I whisper to the heavens. I love it here,' lands with new weight. The update confirms that Claire and Don married, and that she calls him 'the home of my heart.'

As heard by us

A tender Modern Love encore about illness, late love, and the ordinary days that become precious when time narrows.

Claire Corey's story starts with a girlhood dream of love on a Montana farm, then moves into a harder intimacy: learning to love life when time has become painfully concrete.

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Why you'd press play

You'll hear a woman call a shower and a commute one of the best days of her life.

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