Battling.

Christopher Hitchens HERE touches on our desire to see cancer victims as "battling":

Unfortunately, it also involves confronting one of the most appealing clichés in our language. You’ve heard it all right. People don’t have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. You don’t hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Four years ago I touched on this also.

5) “She’s fighting cancer” 

This is another thing people say to make themselves feel better. So & so is 94, has cancer, is immobile and in a hospital bed but we gotta say “Hey, she’s fighting it. She’s a fighter.” Is she? I dunno. You’re basically lying there – there’s nothing you can do with your hands, the medication’s not working; am I now to believe you’re using a Jedi mind trick to keep yourself alive? We always like to feel like someone hung there an extra day or two by sheer determination. Cause yeah, if there’s ever a period of my life I’d like to drag out a little longer it’s when I’m in bed shitting myself while my family hovers over top of me waiting for me to kick so they can all fight for my “Highlights” collection. I wanna be the other guy, so they say “Yeah, I dunno, I thought Xmastime woulda lasted a few more days, but he really seemed to give up and let himself die. Didn’t fight it at all. A quitter, some might say.”

Hitch has me beat however in his determination to not crap out at the last second and start bargaining with a God he doesn't believe in. Just as with whenever I walk onto a plane I revert back to being a super-Catholic, I expect my final moments, after decades spent not believing in a god, to be a cringe-inducing theater of begging and pleading and completely acting like a fucking pussy. Fucking christ.