Kari, my new personal trainer, had me down on the mat when, in the middle of a tough set of obliques, my T-shirt rode up and revealed “it.” It was a 16-inch-long scar that runs from below my navel to my breastbone. Kari didn’t hesitate to ask: “What’s up with your scar?”

Although “my scar” — and I do feel proprietary about it — has been a part of me for more than three decades, an answer still doesn’t come easily. My first inclination was to pretend I hadn’t heard the question. Then I briefly considered telling her a flat-out lie: “I was shot in the stomach” (I once knew a guy with a similar etching on his belly that really was caused by a gunshot wound). Finally I settled on the truth: “It’s from a long-ago cancer surgery,” I explained, outing myself as a member of the “cancer club.”

In 1984, after an eight-hour operation to remove cancerous lymph nodes from my abdominal cavity and two weeks in the hospital, I went home with my scar. It’s actually a remarkable wound — sutured with silk, woven with wire, and zipped up with no-rust staples. At the time I was single and 26. For more than 30 years I’ve wrestled with how to come to terms with all that it embodies — and how to talk about it.

At first, when the wound was still red and raw — and so visible, before my chest and belly hair grew back — I didn’t want anyone to see it. Including me. I was embarrassed to take off my shirt in a locker room or at the beach. At home alone, I’d undress in a dark closet to make sure I didn’t catch a glimpse of it. Every so often, I’d step out of the shower and see that rough-hewed line, and it would set off an avalanche of emotion. It wasn’t just the obvious disfigurement. The scar represented the loss of my younger self’s sense of invulnerability, and — no surprise — triggered a fear of death.