They Have Been Friends for 50 Years Then One Diagnosis Changed Everything

Some Friendships Are Built for the Long Run

Diana Prince and Candace Eng have been best friends since 1977. They met nearly 50 years ago and have been part of each other’s lives ever since – through every season, every difficulty, every milestone that accumulates over a half century of knowing someone.

When Candace was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2025, Diana was there. Not in the casual way of someone who sends a text and hopes for the best, but in the full and committed way of a person who has already decided that her friend’s hard times are her hard times too.

“We just see our friendship as just being, you know, being a close friendship,” Diana said. “We don’t realize it would touch so many lives, and we’re glad that it has, because if we can help in any way, that’s what we want to do.”

What Showing Up Actually Looks Like

The specifics of how Diana supported Candace through diagnosis, treatment, and recovery belong to the two of them. What has reached the public – through coverage that has resonated with readers and viewers across the country – is the quality of the presence Diana offered. She was there.

For anyone who has navigated a serious illness, or watched someone they love do it, those two words contain multitudes. Being there means not disappearing when the situation becomes difficult. It means returning phone calls, driving to appointments, sitting in waiting rooms, holding space for fear and frustration and the dark hours that come with any serious diagnosis.

Diana did those things. She did them because she has known Candace for nearly 50 years and because, at some point in a friendship that long, the line between your life and your friend’s life becomes something you can no longer clearly trace.

Why This Story Travels

Stories about friendship – real, sustained, unconditional friendship – travel because they touch something most people recognize. The fear that illness will isolate. The hope that the people who matter will stay. The particular relief of discovering, in a hard season, that you are not alone.

Diana and Candace’s story has resonated across the audiences who have encountered it not because it is dramatic or unusual, but because it is true. A friendship of nearly 50 years, tested by something serious, proved itself. The outcome was not just that Candace got through treatment. The outcome was also that both of them discovered what they already suspected: the friendship was the real thing.

What 50 Years of Friendship Teaches

Relationships of that length – friendships that survive decades of change, distance, the different directions lives take – are not common. They require something that is harder to name than loyalty or commitment, though it includes both. They require a willingness to keep choosing each other, again and again, across time and circumstances that neither person could have predicted when the friendship began.

Diana and Candace began their friendship in 1977. They could not have known, then, what 2025 would bring. They could not have known that Candace would face a cancer diagnosis, or that Diana would be the person in the chair beside her. They only knew each other – and kept knowing each other, for 48 years, until the moment when that knowledge meant everything.

A Reminder That Needed to Be Said

In a news cycle that is heavy with the difficult, the story of two women who have kept faith with each other for half a century is not a small thing. It is a reminder that the most durable human structures are not made of stone or policy or institution.

They are made of the decision, made quietly and repeatedly over years, to show up.

Candace and Diana have been making that decision since 1977. They are still making it.

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