The cost of hope and the price to be paid for refusing to accept death

WHEN her husband, Terence Bryan Foley, died, it took Amanda Bennett by surprise.

It shouldn’t have. He had, after all, been diagnosed with cancer seven years earlier, when he was 60. In the intervening period, he had undergone scans, been part of clinical trials, suffered appalling side-effects from some of the treatments, and lost enough weight for his clothes to hang limply around him.

Yet Amanda had never developed or acknowledged the development of the sense that he might be dying. Her position was that this was a chronic disease to be fought, not a fatal disease to be surrendered to.