Singing is good for you. Singing with others may be even better.

The choir met on Wednesdays in a London church, and if the Tube was on strike, it took Hazel Hardy two buses across the city to get there — but no matter. By the time she entered the hall, she says, she’d “escaped whatever was outside,” including her cancer.

The choir members, who met from 2016 to 2018, were all familiar with cancer — they were patients, caregivers and oncologists — but they didn’t discuss it. They were there to sing. To have a bit of fun and meet people. For Hardy, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer shortly before joining the group, it was a “new kind of family.”