“This was a big piece of what I wanted to consider. I don’t exactly feel like I have a polemic in me to be written, but I think reckoning with another person’s choice to stop treatment is an essential and complicated reckoning. We have increasingly more medicines, which is great. And for many people who learn there are no more treatment options, the possibility of new protocols would be a gift. But there are also essential conversations to be had about what a person wants to endure, how a person defines what “living” means to them. For some the secondary health problems from years of treatment become unbearable. And a limited life is not a life they want to continue just because medicines can keep them alive. This is a difficult conversation. And it’s not a static, singular one. Each person’s threshold for what it is to have a life, to be alive, is radically different and shifts at stages in a life.”