Four years ago, a woman I lovea friend who felt sisterly and vibrantdied of breast cancer. She was 33. I feel like I must spell it out: thirty-three. I want to paint it on a brick wall in the middle of the night. I want to wear it like the scarlet letter A. I want every billboard to read two numbers: 3 and 3.

Her name was Julia. The daughter of wealthy Finns, she'd spent the last decade in London as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. But living life in a suit and managing money was an empty legacy handed down from the ghost of her father. She wanted to live her own life, to know what that was.

Though Julia later told me she hated me at firstwho's that skinny bitch? she thoughtwe developed a closeness I'd never felt before or since. We met at a weekend workshop, the kind you go to when you're on a journey of self-discovery. At the post-weekend celebration, when we still barely knew each other, I walked up to her and gave her a bead, yellow splashed with red. "This is for your shaman," I said. She looked at it, then at me. The smooth plain of her Scandinavian face, its beauty both simple and striking, crumpled into a child's cry.

Years later, when we sat on a bench in Hyde Park on my birthday, the rose garden blooming around us, the petals scattered on the ground, her face slid into sorrow when she told me I was the first person who had truly seen her.

After the workshop, she joined my women's circle, which met in my flat in Bloomsbury, a five-minute walk from the British Museum. I couldn't help but admire Juliaher hazel eyes lined in black, her body draped in a leather jacket or faded pastels heavy with cotton flowers. Her soft featuresfeather-thin eyebrows, silken hair, a doll's nosereminded me of my Scandinavian past. One evening as we sat cross-legged on her living room floor in Notting Hill, she told me, "We've been meeting like this for centuries. I just know it." We called each other shaman sisters, and talked about our connection to the world we couldn't see.

When Julia jumped out of her linear life as an investment banker, she brought intensity alongside her liberation. She became a regular at 10-day silent retreats. She read voraciously, recommending one book after another on spiritual healing, energy work, archetypes, all of which I have bought, none of which I have read. She didn't live outside reality, but each of the new rules formed definitive, hard lines. She got cross with me when I brought her a glass of water during dinner, telling me, "I don't drink with my meals!" as if I should have known.

It's hard, at any point, to determine what we should have known. I wanted to know how to heal her, just as she wanted to know how to heal herself. According to the oft-doubted Kbler-Ross stages of grief, in the aftermath of everything we couldn't have known, I am stuck in stage two, anger. Anger "becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them," Kbler-Ross said.

Across America, or at least across Brooklyn, where I live now, posters of women defeating breast cancer with a smile and a pink shirt adorn the streets, the buses, and the subway cars. The word survivor is always followed by an exclamation markthe first does not exist without the second. These women are walking for a cure, they're making strides against cancer. They raise money, they walk, they run, and a small portion goes to cancer research, and maybe one day a cure will appear and it will be because of them. The problem is, I don't believe it.

I am sure that many never see the posters, but for me they are everywhere, each one inciting fury. In my head, I talk back. Cancer is so fun. Cancer is pretty in pink.Cancer is arms raised, fists pumping. Cancer is woo-hoo. Cancer is commodified: Revlon, Avon, the women's brands, the brands that care, own this disease.

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Tinged Pink: When The Cancer Narrative Can't Compass Your Loss