They did everything together for four decades. Birthdays. Breakups. Late-night phone calls that started with laughter and ended with silence. They were the kind of friends people assumed would grow old side by side, with grey hair, inside jokes no one else understood, funerals attended together long before either imagined it would be their turn.

Then cancer came. It arrived first for Brioche. Lung cancer. Aggressive. Ruthless. The kind that neither asked for permission nor waited for the timing to make sense. A couple of weeks later, it came for Kris with a K too. Breast. Breast cancer. They uttered the same prayer in different voices and with identical desperation.

Nearly one in three women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, they say – a statistic meant to prepare us, perhaps, or numb us. But statistics feel strangely hollow when they land on two best friends within weeks of each other, just like lightning striking twice in the same place, on the same street, in the same lifetime.

They prayed together. Separately. Loudly. Quietly. They prayed in hospital corridors and in cars parked outside oncology wards. They prayed through chemotherapy, through physiotherapy, through nausea and hair loss and the kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. They prayed for strength. They prayed for healing. They prayed with the same words, the same hope, the same belief that if prayer meant anything, it would mean something here.

Kris with a K beat cancer. The doctors said the words everyone waits for. The scans were clear. The treatment had worked. There were hugs and tears and plans postponed, suddenly resurrected.

A thanksgiving service was carefully and lovingly organised. They had coffee, doughnuts, and the best praise and worship leader, booked months in advance. It was gratitude curated into a programme.

A couple of days later, Kris with a K was sitting in a hospice room, holding Brioche’s hand. She prayed her into transition. She spoke softly about peace and rest and about Jesus waiting on the other side. She spoke with courage on the outside, yet on the inside, something else was happening. She was furious, confused and heartbroken. She was bargaining silently with a God she was no longer sure how to address.

Brioche never knew that Kris with a K was cancer-free. Kris with a K told herself that Brioche would find out anyway. She thought that if the spirit world worked the way people said it did, then knowledge would come with peace and knowing would not change the outcome. She told herself that love didn’t require disclosure.

After Brioche died, Kris with a K didn’t attend her own thanksgiving service. Her sister found her in the morgue, standing in front of Brioche’s lifeless, still, unmistakably gone body. Gently, almost apologetically, her sister reminded her of the service and how much effort had gone into it. She reminded her that she ought to be grateful because God had answered her prayers. Kris with a K turned and asked one question.

“What about Brioche?”

Did she not pray hard enough? Not loud enough? Did God not hear her? Did He hear her and choose not to answer? After all, they prayed the same prayers.

Her sister had no answer. Neither do I.

Every week, I try to offer a conclusion. Even when the ending is uncomfortable, I usually find a way to wrap it neatly. A bow on top. A lesson. A sentence that lands with purpose. This story resists that.

Kris with a K lived and felt guilty for it. She wondered why she was spared when Brioche wasn’t. She wondered what she was meant to do with a life that felt borrowed, undeserved, heavier than before. Survival did not feel like victory. It felt like responsibility without instructions.

Brioche became the unanswered prayer that lives quietly in all of us. The one we revisit when life feels unfair. The one we don’t know how to reconcile. The one that makes gratitude feel complicated and faith feel fragile.

I don’t know why one lived and one didn’t. I don’t know why prayers that sound identical yield different outcomes. I don’t know why healing arrives selectively. I don’t know why love doesn’t seem to tip the scales.

What I do know is this: eventually, everything works out exactly as it should, even when we never understand how.

Perhaps that is why, in the absence of answers, the only prayer that remains is the simplest one.

May thy will be done.

See you next week.

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