Call me a conscientious objector, but I'd like to demilitarize cancer. I know, I recently devoted two weeks of posts to the war on cancer, but would you have known what I was talking about if I'd called it something else? The name, after all, has been used for more than 40 years to describe our nation's commitment to finding a cure.

Popular culture has also long and often used war as a metaphor to describe the human experience of cancer. We are attacked by an invading force, and we must counterattack with an impressive arsenal of weapons to overcome the enemy.

I don't think so. For starters, cancer begins with a single genetic mistake within our own bodies, so why would I want to think of my body as an enemy when, for the most part, it has served me well? It does, after all, keep me alive. No, I wasn't about to go to war with myself even when my body made a mistake.

Yet everywhere we turn, messages tell us to keep up the fight, as if we can control the outcome. Like all good soldiers, we're expected to put up our shields and become strong, brave warriors, if not for ourselves, at least for our families and friends.

I'm the first to believe that acting brave can sometimes make us feel brave, and sometimes shields are necessary, but I got really tired of hearing "Keep up the fight and I know you'll win."

I always wanted to reply, "So will it be my fault if I croak?" And let's face it. Sometimes what life has in store for us doesn't always correlate to our will or our effort.

We're even told how to fight: with a good attitude. Excuse me, but my attitude neither caused my cancer nor could it cure it, and the pressure to maintain a perpetual good attitude is neither realistic nor sustainable.

Sure, a good attitude helped me slog through chemotherapy and the day-to-day challenges. And of course I wanted to create at atmosphere of hope for my husband Alex and others who cared about me, but my optimism occasionally ran low and I dropped my guard and cried.

Does that mean I gave up? No, it meant I was human — capable of feeling, fearing, crying and moving on.

And of course we're told never to surrender. Sadly, losses are inevitable, but the pressure not to surrender has left some people feeling guilty or defeated if, toward the end, they ultimately opt for quality of life over harsh treatment that offers no clinical benefit.

That's no surrender. It's a personal choice that requires coming to terms with a finite amount of time and choosing how to spend it, something I could never have understood until I brushed close to death.

War implies two opposing forces locked in a battle until one or the other loses, but no one loses to cancer because cancer doesn't live on victorious after death. Our legacies do: how we loved our families and taught our kids to live, for example.

If my cause of death is ultimately cancer and Alex outlives me and writes my obituary, I've already told him that it better not say, "After a long and valiant fight, Betsy lost her battle with cancer." It would really frost me if my life were defined by some sort of military campaign and my death implied that cancer had won.

The fact is, I never, not once, "fought" my cancer. I made a series of choices with the hope of extending my life — like, among other things, showing up at the hospital and treating myself to a series of potentially life-saving drugs until one of them worked. That's not fighting. It was choosing the possibility of life over certain death.

That's what we all do every day. We make a series of choices in response to the challenges that slip into our lives alongside joy and pleasure. Undoubtedly, cancer is one of the biggest challenges many of us will ever face, but declaring war on it gives cancer far too much clout within the context of a lifetime.

Maybe military rhetoric is fine for some, but for others, like me, viewing our illnesses through the lens of war only adds another layer of frustration to a situation that's hard enough. Our challenge is that military metaphors are deeply entrenched in cancer rhetoric, and because we're all so accustomed to hearing them, I even use them occasionally, despite my distaste.

But each of us can choose our own terms. For me, the metaphor of a roller coaster was a good fit because cancer felt like a series of twists and turns and ups and downs — like life but with twistier turns and deeper downs.

Some have described their experience as a journey. Others have called it a match, a competition, a rough sail, a marathon, weeds in a garden, even a dance.

The ranks of conscientious objectors to war metaphors are swelling, and you, too, can relieve them of duty because there's no rule that requires us to incorporate war talk into our own experience.

Next Friday, April 8: Tune in to Battling and Beating Cancer

Previous installments of Candid Cancer are archived here.

Betsy de Parry is the author of The Roller Coaster Chronicles, a book about her experience with cancer and the shorter, serialized version she wrote for annarbor.com. Find her on Facebook or email her.