Telling them won’t make things easier, for them or you. I can’t emphasize that enough. What, exactly, are you expecting to happen? Hugs and an understanding goodbye? Not. Gonna. Happen.

Have you considered not telling them?

A crisis causes people to react in severe ways, and believe me, people will consider this a crisis. There will be tears of sadness and anger. You’ll hear the same tiresome lecture, and have to answer the same condescending questions, over and over. If you ask them to keep things within the immediate family, other people will “magically” find out (the most generous interpretation is that you’re laying something incredibly heavy on your family; it’s to be expected that some of them will need to talk about it with friends.) Some of the people you didn’t tell will even have the nerve to contact you, and force their moral “advice” down your throat.

Best case: your final interactions with the people you love will be sad and painful, and perhaps angry. Worst case: you’ll be put on informal “suicide watch”, and learn to hate and distrust the people you expected support from.

Spend some quality time with whoever you were planning to tell. Say goodbye in your heart, but don’t tell them it’s goodbye. Make some pleasant financial memories.

You have my sincere sympathies. I have family going through cancer right now and it’s a bastard. Nobody deserves it.

The best way to break the news is a highly personal thing. What’s good for one family might not be good for another family. If your family is supportive, they’ll probably want to help somehow. If your family is toxic, you don’t owe them anything, not even a diagnosis if you don’t want to. And in all cases, any sort of reaction is reasonable to expect - receiving news of your diagnosis is the first step in grieving and you can never be sure how people will react to that.

At the end of the day, you’ve got a much better idea how your family might react than a bunch of strangers on the internet. But I’ll go ahead and share our bad news delivery system, and you can decide if it works for you.

Ours is a family that believes in eating our feelings and ripping off the bandaid. When we have bad news to share, we invite the family out to lunch. Somewhere public if you feel that’s appropriate. After everyone’s ordered we hit them with a “Listen, I’ve got some bad news…” and then just jump into it. Then after the news has hit, the creature comforts of a hot meal does wonders to soothe the soul.

Telling everyone at once can be intimidating. You might find you benefit from having a confidant who knows your situation. Breaking the news one-on-one is often easier, and then when you’re ready to tell the group they can be there to back you up.

No internet forum is really good for receiving medical advice on, and I won’t talk you into or out of treatment. However, if you’ve only just received the first test results, you may not have a complete picture of what’s going on.

Ultimately, it sounds like you don’t want to suffer. And I respect the hell out of that. But if you only just received your diagnosis, you might be in shock and incapable of seeing anything hopeful.

Some people conflate the testing and determining prognosis and treatment plan with the treatment itself. I guess all I’m saying is that before you decide that you don’t want treatment, you should consult with doctors you trust and determine what that treatment actually is. Not all cancers are equal, and the aggressiveness of the treatment has much to do with where it is and how progressed it is.

Anyway, as in all things, it’s your body so it should be your choice. But when you’re making big choices it helps to have all the data.