“I am sorry to have ruined your morning,” she says, clasping my hand, both of us tearful.

I spot her bracelets, beaded ones spelling the names of her kids. After wearing them for a few days, she slid them off only to cause the kids mock offence – they were meant as “forever” bracelets.

She knows that I, too, have a bracelet story. Mine is a $2 “pearls and diamond” piece from the Mother’s Day stall bought last decade that still drips with love. I wear it to the most significant events in my life.

The problem with having dying patients of the same age as you is that your seemingly parallel lives are prone to being torn asunder.

She is a professional woman whose children need the same reminders as mine: do your homework; clothes off the floor; the dishwasher doesn’t unload itself. We could compare endless notes about our messy, imperfect children, but this would be to digress from the real reason she sees me: to treat a cancer that was curable, then incurable – and now relentlessly terminal.

She is exhausted by her illness and a contested divorce where her main goal was to secure a house for her children. “I am done,” she announces one day, reflecting that the constant pain, weight loss, and inexorable fatigue make her want to spend her remaining days in the company of her children.

To answer such weighty considerations with a simple “I agree” seems like an injustice. Yet it is all the validation needed.

For someone who could be........

© The Guardian