My stepmother died of cancer last year and asked that her obituary refer to her "long negotiation with cancer" instead of "long battle with cancer", I think because she also disliked the "battle" and "struggle" notion for similar reasons.
Perhaps calling it a “battle” or naming cancer the “enemy” gives some a cathartic way to cope with it. Gives one energy so to speak. My parents died of cancer and I have lost several friends to it, and none of them used this terminology, but I imagine I will if it comes to it.
If someone with cancer gains strength or comfort from using that terminology, I support them. I should have clarified that my beef is with others using those words to describe me or an abstract other.
I get this, by why only cancer? There are other generally lethal (though treatable) diseases in the world. Yet you typically don't get to hear about somebody's, say, "battle with diabetes", or "battle with AIDS".
I can't speak for you but the term "battle with <disease>" is frightfully common. Copy and paste both your example quotes into google and see for yourself.
I'm not sure if these variations are nearly as popular, at least in epitaphia. But I'm not a native English speaker, so I can't really argue about it. In my first language (Polish) people die "after a long battle with cancer", and I feel like it's very rare to come across the same phrase in reference to some other illness.
It makes cancer an identity, and the cancer status subsumes their life as well as their body. Everything is about the cancer and how they deal with it.
When you are told by a doctor that you have a thing and it's a very deadly thing, the psychological component -- for both you and everyone you deal with -- is huge. The specter of death and the battle with it can blot out the sun, so to speak.
My experiences suggest that wresting your identity away from this pattern of thought is life giving and helps people survive in very practical terms.
It's not voodoo magic. It strongly influences the mental models that drive your decision-making process.
When people believe death is inevitable, they tend to make choices that help that become a self-fulfilling prophecy because they believe nothing they do will really matter anyway.
I used to spend a lot of time on chronic illness lists. I left all of them because it was a general truism that you couldn't talk about what worked since the absolute sickest people who had the most and worst horror stories were the same people who would outright mock things like removing carpeting from the house and going to all wood and tile floors or making dietary changes.
They were extremely dismissive of the idea that anything made a real difference and they insisted they couldn't be bothered with stuff like that because they wanted to "have a life" and their illness already took too much of their time as is. They simply didn't have time or energy for such "neurotic" and "obsessive" behavior.
It was absolutely verboten to point out that the people being proactive about diet and the like we're healthier than these people were. God forbid you should imply it was "their fault" that their prognosis was so extremely bad compared to the rest of the community. That would be cruel and would be "blaming the victim."
So I ultimately unsubscribed from whatever lists I hadn't already been thrown off of for the crime of suggesting that maybe us patients could do something effective without drugs, surgeries or a doctor's permission, like eat better and use non toxic cleaners and the like. I got off all the drugs and quit getting the email notices about another death in the chronic illness community.
