'I needed someone to put into words that this wasn't her fault': Readers respond to column about cancer language

I watched - and ducked in and out of - a tangled, important, often painful dialogue this weekend about cancer and the language we use to describe it.

Last week, after Alex Trebek announced he has stage 4 pancreatic cancer, I wrote a column about attaching the words "battle" and "lose" and "win" to the disease. I interviewed Chicagoan Sheila Quirke, whose 4-year-old daughter and both parents died of cancer.

Quirke advocates for pausing to consider the words we fall back on when someone is diagnosed with cancer.

"People who die from their cancer diagnosis