The Changing Face of Stage 4 Cancer
The New York Times | Minneapolis, Minnesota
Kate Dietrick is 42, an archivist at the University of Minnesota Libraries, and she has Stage 4 breast cancer. She spent a morning in March shopping for a gravesite. Writer Nina Agrawal spent months reporting her story for the Times Well section — the particular limbo that longer-surviving terminal patients now inhabit, caught between treatments and a death they know is coming but can't schedule.
The assignment required sustained access across a range of environments: a cemetery, her home in St. Paul, her workplace at the Archives on the University of Minnesota campus, and the ordinary life she and her husband Nate were still building — walking their dog, planning an exhibit, keeping the retirement contributions going. The challenge in this kind of work is the same across every environment and my work in healthcare and feature photography: you're not illustrating the disease; you're photographing a person who contains it. The pictures have to hold the full weight of what the story is about without reducing the subject to her diagnosis.
The piece was published June 12, 2026 in The New York Times Well section.