Whether you’re King or commoner, cancer makes you confront your mortality

It’s unavoidable that when you hear, “it’s cancer,” as I did in autumn 2022, it comes as a terrible shock. However, I am 90 years old, and while the King is younger, he is 75, so thoughts of mortality aren’t strange to either of us. Our parents have died and people of our own generation are beginning to; I open the obituary pages and find that friends’ names are there.