I held her hand, I tried to soothe her. I said, People say the wrong things—

You were smart not to have children, she said.

It was not, by any means, the first time she’d said this to me, but this time it was said with unusual force. Then, as if realizing that maybe she ought not to have spoken so to me: You know, I specifically told other people not to come see me this afternoon because I wanted it to be just us.

I did not have any real news to share so I talked about other things, the usual things, books I’d been reading, movies I’d seen, and how everyone who lived in my building was freaking out because one apartment was reported to have bedbugs. My friend and I had met in our early twenties when we worked at the same literary journal. The editor in chief, our old boss, had died earlier that year, and we talked about him, about our old days at the journal and what its future might be, now that its founder and editor in chief was gone, and I told her about the memorial service, which I’d attended, and which she said that she, too, would have attended had she not been ill.

We talked about other people we knew in common, others we’d first met at the journal, the ones with whom we were still friends, the ones with whom we’d lost touch. The dead. I worried about all this talk about death, some of it about people (like our old boss) who’d succumbed to the same disease now threatening my friend’s life, but it was she who directed the conversation, as she pretty much always did when we were together: it was her way.

Though she was somewhat groggy from medication (and, though she denied it, I believe also in pain), she carried on in the emphatic manner she was known for, unmistakably someone who’d spent a good part of her life behind a lectern. I was reminded that she had always been known for her vigor. She was the kind of person whom others describe as a fighter, a survivor, and it was because of this that we who knew her were surprised when she announced that she intended to forgo treatment. And unsurprised when she changed her mind. She had not been wrong, however, to dread treatment. At first I hardly recognized her. White as an egg and skinny as a chopstick was how she’d tried to prepare me. And minus every strand of what had once been a thundercloud of hair.