Our waiter approaches to ask whether we’d like another round, ignoring that my friend’s glass is still full. (This is just for show, she’d said earlier, waving a hand over her gin and tonic. I can’t drink on these meds. You’ll have to drink for both of us.) My own glass was drained some time ago and no sooner is the waiter gone than I reach for hers. For a moment she watches me with an amused expression, then says, I know your feelings won’t be hurt when I say that you weren’t my first choice.

Her two closest friends have said no. They could never be a part of any kind of assisted dying, they told her, not even indirectly. Even though they understood why she had come to such a decision and how much they, too, did not want her to suffer, they could never stand by while she took her own life, they would try to stop her. No, they said. No. No.

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.