One day on the phone, the woman who for years our was banker in Florida asked me, "Is Corinne a fighter?" I reminded her that Linda had been a ferocious fighter, but to no good end.

Corinne is the coldest realist I have ever known. I used to joke about this being the result of her German upbringing. Though she knows fear intimately, her courage and my experience require us both to face the bare truth at every turn.

Cancer is what it is: one renegade cell, unkillable by the immune system, gone wild and relentlessly growing to destroy its host. We believe it doesn't come to us because we have bad thoughts (or have done bad deeds), and it doesn't go away because we have good thoughts. We believe that every last malignant cell has to be killed on purpose for a cure.