There was one woman, my friend said, who joined the group around the same time that she did. This woman was around sixty, she’d been born in Bulgaria, and though she had lived in America since she was in high school she spoke English with an accent. She and her husband, of Bulgarian parents but American born, had been married for forty years. Retired now, her husband had worked all his life as a buildings inspector. She was a dental assistant. Three kids, all now grown. It had started out as a loving marriage, the woman told the group. She spoke of sweet memories of their early years: the wedding, the children’s births in quick succession—all healthy and beautiful—granted like wishes, one two three.

But husband and wife had fallen out of love long ago, she said, and for most of the marriage they had not got along. In fact, the woman confessed, home was such a battleground that her children were glad when they were old enough to move out. After that, the couple fought less but led increasingly separate lives, she said. They slept in separate rooms, they did not always sit down to meals together. Whole days passed in which they exchanged barely a word. Still, they had taken a vow: for better, for worse. Plus, they were Catholic. There would be no divorce.

It had taken a while, the woman told the group, before they knew how sick she was. At first no one said anything about cancer. Her symptoms were probably caused by an ulcer, they said, or acid reflux, maybe even just a pulled muscle. The truth came in spurts, with one test after another bringing darker news than the last. (Grave nods from the group: this was a well-trod path.) Her husband’s first response had been mostly irritation, the woman said. His wife had always been a hypochondriac, he told the doctor (not entirely without reason, his wife was willing to admit). He suffered from acid reflux himself, so what? Aches and pains—they were no spring chickens, either of them. But when a clear diagnosis of cancer was confirmed, the woman told the group, her husband changed.

At first, she said, she thought she might have been imagining it. Her children insisted that this was so—and no surprise, they said, given what she was going through. The shock. The fear. Not to mention the well-known disturbances of chemo brain.

But it was not her imagination, she said. Not shock, not fear, not chemo brain. Once the prognosis for metastatic pancreatic cancer had been explained to them, she said, her husband brightened up.