For many people cancer is a death sentence. Maybe this is why a warlike vocabulary has grown up around the disease. We use phrases such as ‘fighting the battle’. But not everyone feels comfortable with such imagery. My daughter Megan was one who did not. It’s not a war, she wrote shortly before her death from cancer at the age of 32. Similar thoughts were expressed by a man facing death in very different circumstances. Michael Lambrix was a prisoner on Death Row in the USA. He was executed in October 2017. ‘I suppose it’s really not that different from the resolve most cancer patients feel when they too are counting down their last days – especially those who have suffered for so long under that threat of death, and when that final countdown does come, there’s almost a sense of relief that the journey may finally come to an end and the suffering will finally pass, ‘ he wrote.