What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

This is how it is with people, she tells me now. No matter what, they want you to keep fighting. This is how we’ve been taught to see cancer: a fight between patient and disease. Which is to say between good and evil. There’s a right way and a wrong way to act. A strong way and a weak way. The warrior’s way and the quitter’s way. If you survive you’re a hero. If you lose, well, maybe you didn’t fight hard enough. You wouldn’t believe all the stories I get about this or that person who refused to accept the death sentence they got from those nasty stupid doctors and was rewarded with many, many more years of life. People don’t want to hear terminal, she says. They don’t want to hear incurable, or inoperable. They call that defeatist talk. They say insane things like As long as you stay alive there’s a chance. And Medical miracles happen every day—as if they’d been keeping track. They say, If you just hang in there, who knows, they might find a cure. I never knew that so many smart, educated people were under the illusion that a cure for cancer is just around the corner.