“I had a neighbor stop by, and she told my husband, well, everything happens for a reason. And he immediately just said, I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear the reason my wife is dying.”

I thought that I had tried to write an article that was basically saying that it's incredibly painful to die in a culture where everybody has a reason. And one of the great ironies, of course, was that many people read that article and was like, oh my gosh. It feels like this woman would really like me to let her know what the reason is. I will send that to her now. And so I got like, I mean, thousands of pieces of mail. I got banners with triumphant scripture that I was supposed to repeat over and over again so that I could be healed. I got, I mean, I think one of the meanest ones was somebody wrote the reasons why he thought that I probably deserved to die on the back of a church bulletin. And I think most of the attempts were trying to pour certainty over pain and to say, let me fill in the spiritual gaps and give you a spiritual explanation for how God works. God is just. There must be something in here about God's justice that you're not acknowledging. God is understandable. Surely you can sift through your own spiritual past and find some kind of opening, some kind of causality. Or, or actually, maybe God has provided a set of spiritual tools that you're not using. Let me explain them to you so that you know what to do. And some of them were from other religious traditions. Like for those who believe in reincarnation, don't worry, your story will go on. Or, I mean, I will never forget the like the love in some of these very heartbreaking notes about like, Kate, I have wasted my own life. I wish, I wish there was a way that we could, that, that you could take a little of mine and I could take a little of yours and we could make a world that is fair.

I understand that at one point, one of your neighbors stopped by your house to share a sentiment with your husband.

The responses to your illness were so consistent that you eventually divided them into different categories. And you describe these groups of people as the minimizers, the teachers, and the solutions people. Unpack those terms for me, Kate.

Well, the minimizers are pretty sure that whatever is going on, it's probably not as bad as I think it is. So these were at least, any sentence starting with at least is typically a minimizer. At least you're at a good hospital. I remember when we were in the earliest days, really struggling with whether or not this would bankrupt me and my family and my parents, actually. At least someone said you have the intellectual resources to deal with it. I always wanted to like push back of like, at least it's not stage five cancer. Like, when do I graduate into your compassion? So, yeah, at least minimizers are pretty easy to spot. The teachers want you to learn something that might save your own life. And it could be an emotional lesson. It could be a medical lesson. But that there's always, have I heard about, you know, drinking the blood of ducks from Albuquerque? Like, it could get increasingly like ridiculous, but there's just such a, in the face of this much pain and uncertainty, they need to hand you a lesson so that you can climb your way back onto the boat. The solutions people are upset that there is not more certainty and that you should be on a quest to really solve the problem of pain. And so solutions people are not going to believe that you've ever done enough. And they're going to want to hear you say that there's a new clinical trial that you're in, that there's like another faith healer that you're listening to or seeking out, but they will never accept that illness is likely something that's happening to you and not with your consent.

So I'm hearing a common thread in all of these responses. People are trying in some ways to preserve a sense of loss. And order around an event that was frightening in its randomness. Does that sound right to you as an explanation for these different veins of feedback and advice?