“When people get cancer, they die.”

In the trailer for Lulu Wang’s upcoming movie Farewell, the mother of the main character says

Chinese people have a saying: when people get cancer, they die.

I was wondering if anyone here knows such a saying in Mandarin or has a source on it.

For context, the story’s about Wang’s family keeping her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis a secret from the grandmother. The reasoning for that decision is, if the grandmother learns she has cancer, she’ll be frightened, depressed and possibly give up the will to live, which would hasten a decline in her health. So I don’t think the literal meaning of the saying is “cancer is a fatal disease,” but rather that the knowledge of being terminally ill drives people to give up the will to live, or something like this.

submitted by /u/Jacot_LeMiere
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