Might as well disclose it here: I never had much sympathy for the daughter. I never liked her. She was, it must be said, an extraordinarily unlikable little girl. I recall how guilty my aversion to her used to make me feel: she was just a child, after all. But I had never before met a child so disagreeable. She lied with the skill of a con artist. She broke her toys on purpose. She stole things that she could have had just by asking for them. She bullied smaller children. When her grandmother gave her a kitten she teased it so relentlessly that it became almost feral.

When it came time for college, she applied only to schools in distant states (She wants to get as far away from me as possible, her mother said, accurately), and later, for postgraduate work, she went farther still and lived for a few years abroad. She had always shown both a gift and a passion for writing, but rather than pursue a literary career (Follow in my footsteps? said my friend. Never happen), she went into business, specifically the business of advising others how to manage their businesses, eventually specializing in hospitality and entertainment. At this she turned out to be something of a whiz, and because it was work that involved a lot of travel, and travel was the one thing she loved more than work itself, and because, thanks to her job, travel usually meant complimentary luxury travel, she had turned out to be happier than we who’d known her as a girl would ever have predicted.

Once she’d established her complete independence from them, her hostility toward her family diminished. Her grandparents’ deaths, which fell one right after the other, triggered feelings of remorse of which her mother had come to fear she was incapable. It would be an exaggeration to say that mother and daughter reconciled—there would never be true peace between them—but there was less tension, and for a few years, at least, they managed to be in each other’s lives in a manner resembling a normal family relationship.

But it was too late. There was too much history, too much bad blood between them. (With typical dysfunctional-family logic, my friend easily forgave her parents for voting Republican but not her daughter, ever.) In the end, it was simply easier to let go, to do without each other. Just as my friend had yet to meet the man her daughter was living with, her daughter had no idea that her mother also had been seeing someone (a man whose interest cooled, however, once it was clear that she might be seriously ill).

This is where things stood at the time of my friend’s diagnosis.

It’s your choice. What a thing to say, my friend said. It’s your choice. Period. Like it was a small thing. Like it had nothing to do with her.