being that there is an afterlife. I keep thinking about all the people I have met who have died since my diagnosis four years ago—Debbie, Carlyle, Rachel, Colleen, Chris, Jane, and so many more—and I realize that they taught me how to die, that I will follow in their footsteps, that they and others in my family wait to greet me and help me make the transition. And that makes me happy. When I was pregnant with Mia and nervous about giving birth, I consoled myself with the thought that billions of women have done exactly the same thing for millennia, and so there should be no reason why I couldn’t do it and do it well. Similarly, I think now of all these people I know who have died and the billions of people who have died over the millennia, and there is no reason why I cannot also embark on this rite of passage and do it well.
It is my absolute goal to die well, to die at peace, without regret for the life I have lived, proud and satisfied. Why do we always assume that the ideal life is a long one? Why do we assume that it is so awful to die young? Could it be that the ones who die young are better off? Could it be that death offers greater wisdom and joy than this life and those who die young are indeed lucky in their ability to attain those gifts sooner? Perhaps these are simply the musings of a person desperately trying to come to terms with her own early death. And yet, I can assure you that I feel no desperation (other than the desperation to finish all the preparations before it’s too late), that if anything I feel almost total and complete peace.
I do not know if peace comes to all or just to those who seek it, to those who rage or to those who surrender, but over the months of 2017, peace came to me.
42
Preparing
Mia is in third grade, and Belle is in first grade. As school started, parents came together and engaged in some version of the game of one-upmanship, as each tried to “one-up” the others, to wear the cloak for Best and Coolest Summer. Trips to France, Spain, Italy, blah, blah, blah. Of course, I played the game, too. A part of me needed to play, to feel like despite everything, I could still give my children a semblance of a normal childhood and a summer that could rival anyone’s. “Mia and Belle went to South Carolina to see their grandparents, which put them in the path of the total solar eclipse. They loved it. They’ll never forget the experience,” I bragged. Even as I said the words, I wondered why I bother at this stage of my life, why I engage in the stupid, vapid games, why any of it matters at all.
I should have just opened my mouth and stunned them with the truth: “The girls went to South Carolina to see their grandparents and to see the total solar eclipse, but I agonized over whether to allow them to go because I was afraid of losing time with them while they were away for twelve days, or worse yet, that I would die while they were gone. But I realized I had to let them go because that is a necessary part of preparing to die, and that’s what I did this summer—prepare to die. And they may not have been aware of it, but they were also preparing for me to die, to let me go, to start forging their own way in this world without their mother. That’s what our family did this summer. So, why don’t you top that?”
Oh, how I would have loved to see the looks on their faces if I had said all that. How I would have loved to see the shock when hearing complete, absolute, and uncomfortable truth.
The scans in late June that marked the beginning of the children’s summer break also marked the true beginning of the end of my life. I knew it. For two months, this most promising of clinical trials, this trial for which Phase I data had been presented at the annual meeting of clinical oncologists earlier that month (something reserved for only the most exciting of early research findings), had worked. It had shrunk the tumors, even dramatically, it seemed. I’ve often observed how metastatic cancer and