In fact, her first thought upon receiving her diagnosis had been that she wouldn’t accept any treatment at all. When she learned the survival rate for someone with her type of cancer at the stage at which hers had been found (fifty-fifty, according to her research, though her oncologist would not be pinned down), she foresaw a long period of painful and debilitating treatment during which she would be too sick to do anything that could properly be called living and that, in all likelihood, would fail to save her anyway. She had seen it happen too often, she said. So had I. So had we all. Still, we urged her not to give in, we insisted that she must do everything possible to fight the disease. Fifty-fifty: not the worst odds.

And, in the end, it had not been hard to persuade her. She didn’t want to leave the party early. And why not be a guinea pig (over her doctor’s repeated objections, she kept calling herself that).

Only one person did not try to change her mind. Her daughter said simply: It’s your choice.

When I heard this I had a sinking feeling. The two women had a fraught history. Enough bones of contention between us, my friend joked, to make a whole skeleton. She often joked about her relationship with her daughter, partly because humor had always been a strong feature of her personality and partly because it was her way of dealing with difficulty. I remember when her daughter was born: an unusually troubled pregnancy ending in a grueling labor with postpartum hemorrhaging severe enough to require a transfusion—I guess that’s what happens when you bring a monster into the world was how she’d joke about it later.

They lived two thousand miles apart, and although on speaking terms at the time of my friend’s diagnosis (unlike the many times I could recall when they were not), they had not had much contact in years.

I’ve never even met the man she lives with, my friend told me. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear only after the fact that they’d got married.

It’s your choice. It wasn’t for me to judge this response. No need to put the cruelest and most sinister connotation on it, either. But I knew how it might sound to my friend and how much pain it could cause her.

Unnatural is a word that keeps coming to mind when I think about this mother and daughter. For as long as I can remember, there seemed to be only misunderstanding between them. Instances of affection were rare enough when they shared the same roof. Once the daughter moved out, they vanished altogether.