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lake, and emerge from it without struggle. I was sustained by my children—Jamie and Rob and his Barbara—and my friends, especially Charlotte Sheedy, the coven, and Barbara Greenberg. It was a shock to me, who had always lived in proud independence, unwilling but also unable to ask for help, to discover how much I needed them: their company, their sweet words, their concerned expressions.
    When I was first diagnosed, Charlotte sent me a dozen or so books on cancer, most by megalomaniacal doctors who imply (even as they deny) that they have magical powers to cure cancer. They describe miraculous cures, attributing them to their patients but emphasizing their own openness and understanding direction. I believed in the cures, but not in the doctors. Some books were written by patients who claimed to have cured themselves of cancer without medical treatment. I believed they had good luck. I did not believe people could just decide to cure themselves.
    Now that we knew what kind of cancer I had, Charlotte checked with her medical contacts and sent me xeroxed reports on esophageal cancer from medical journals. These professional essays utterly lacked the optimism of the books: dealing only with nonmetastasized esophageal cancer, they reported that treated with strong chemotherapy combined with intense radiation, one of five people survived for five years. Most died within a year. The odds were not great even if the cancer had not metastasized: mine had, and widely, forming tumors outside the esophagus and in two lymph nodes.
    Someone else sent me an article from, I believe, an old New York Times . It described Susan Sontag’s courageous handling of a breast cancer that, when she developed it, was considered terminal. She went to Paris for a severe treatment no American hospital of the time—decades earlier—was willing to risk. I do not now recall whether it involved radiation as well as chemotherapy, but it made Sontag very ill, and it saved her life. That, I thought, was what I wanted to happen to me. But even as I wished it, I knew I was thinking wishfully.
    Being a lung specialist, Dr. Strong could not handle my case, alas, but he arranged for me to see an oncologist in the gastrointestinal service. The night before my appointment, Barbara Greenberg flew down from Boston. I thought she was coming just from affection, which touched me; I did not suspect any other motivation. She had called regularly, and I had kept her up on my condition, but unlike my other friends, she knew I was doomed. She was married to a surgeon who frequently treated cancer and knew that no one survived metastasized esophageal cancer. Barbara came because she wanted to be with me when I saw the doctor who would preside over my dying, and to hold my hand after I heard the news.
    The night she arrived, we went out for dinner, Barbara and I and the coven. We ate at Jezebel’s, owned by an African-American woman, who has draped the restaurant with antique lace and linens and who serves a luscious Midtown version of soul food. Over dinner, we held a coven meeting, complete with eagle feathers, light-up plastic wand, crystals, and incantations. The other diners paid us not the slightest heed; as far as we noticed, not a single head turned. New York is indeed wonderful.
    The next day, Barbara G., Rob, and Jamie trooped with me into the fourth-floor clinic at Sloan-Kettering. The designers of this hospital took pains to make it attractive and comfortable, even in its private areas. Nevertheless, entering it never fails to upset me, because the first-floor lobby is always crowded. An unending stream of people—cancer patients and the family or friends of cancer patients—continually stream through its pleasant corridors: old people in wheelchairs, lovely men and women in their thirties, youngsters with bald heads, babies in their mothers’ arms; just looking around can make you weep. I am old enough that for me the word “cancer” is equivalent to a