With heavy hearts, we open the first SPACE by remembering Catherine O’Hara (1954–2026), the brilliant artist whose work brought laughter and depth to audiences around the world. She died on January 30, 2026 at age 71 from a pulmonary embolism, with an underlying diagnosis of rectal cancer confirmed on her death certificate. 

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Her passing is a loss to the arts, and also a moment to examine how we talk about death in medicine. Far too often, the narrative of “cancer death” erases the biological mechanisms that lead to terminal events, reducing complex physiology to a single word.

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In this SPACE submission, the author, grieved and angry, insists that mechanism matters; that what injures vessels, what forms clots, and how exposures stack toward harm are questions worth asking clearly. We offer this piece not as accusation but as clarity-seeking inquiry, grounded in physiology and demanding of accountability.

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Below is the first SPACE submission, offered in remembrance of Catherine, and in pursuit of better explanation, better language, and better understanding.

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In Remembrance of Catherine O’Hara (1954 – 2026)

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​Cancer Death Is Not the Tumor

 

Catherine O’Hara was a brilliant, generous, unforgettable artist. She died on January 30, 2026 at age 71. The immediate cause of death was pulmonary embolism, according to her Los Angeles County death certificate, with rectal cancer listed as the underlying condition. 

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I am angry. I really liked her. She didn’t have to die so soon.

 

A pulmonary embolism is not a cancer symptom.

It is a vascular event.

 

Tumors do not form clots.

Blood vessels do. When they are injured.

 

Yet when a public figure dies of pulmonary embolism after cancer treatment, the story is immediately collapsed into a single word: cancer.

 

That word functions less as a diagnosis than as a solvent. It dissolves mechanism, responsibility, and inquiry in one stroke.

 

Pulmonary embolism requires a thrombus.

A thrombus requires endothelial dysfunction.

Endothelial dysfunction does not occur spontaneously.

 

It occurs after injury.

 

Ionizing radiation injures endothelium.

Chemotherapy amplifies vascular inflammation.

Repeated diagnostic exposures compound oxidative stress.

Immobility, surgery, ports, anemia. All stack the deck toward clot.

 

This is not controversial science.

This is first-year vascular biology.

 

Yet when the clot reaches the lungs, we are told the cancer “caused” it, as if the tumor entered the bloodstream and blocked an vein by intent. This is not explanation. It is terminology laundering.

 

Calling pulmonary embolism a “cancer death” replaces causation with narrative. It protects treatment from scrutiny by assigning agency to disease. It allows medicine to extract enormous financial and biological cost while disclaiming consequence.

 

The cost of death is not only measured in dollars, though those are staggering. It is measured in misattribution.

 

When exposure history is ignored, preventable injury becomes invisible.

When mechanism is replaced by labels, learning stops.

When anger is neutralized by euphemism, accountability disappears.

 

The honest question is not “Did the patient have cancer?”

The honest question is “What injured the vessels?”

 

Until medicine is willing to answer that question plainly, pulmonary embolism will continue to be treated as an inevitability instead of what it often is: the final expression of accumulated harm.

 

And people will keep dying from clots,

while being told the tumor did it.