I have stage four cancer – there will be no cure, but death isn’t necessarily imminent: this is how it feels to live in the long middle

When I joined my patient support group, we were a collection of disparate lives tethered by a reluctant masonry. We spoke in bruised shorthand: comparing palliative care, clinical trials and the provisional nature of plans. There was an unexpected symmetry in this shared vocabulary. We began as strangers, yet were quickly bound by a radical intimacy that made conventional friendship feel almost superficial by comparison.

But mortality is a notoriously capricious auditor. Some of us, through an opaque quirk of biology or the blind luck of a genetic mutation, traverse the wreckage, while others are overtaken by it. Porous by nature, I absorb the emotional charge of others with an unguarded ease. Consequently, when a peer such as Saskia admits in our group chat that she has reached the end of her options, messaging from an old house in the middle of nowhere about “hospice at home” and texting until she no longer can, the loss feels like a physical removal, an erosion of my own internal geometry.