(1) Conversations of Death

Rough night last night.  Nothing like waking up at 3am to go to the bathroom and end up spending the next 20 minutes getting sick!  Finally, things settled down and I was able to get back to sleep.  I hope this is not the start of something worse.  That's the thing with cancer, it makes you think differently about things.  Sometimes, it has a voice all it's own.  It makes me think of things I don't want to think about, or at least not at this point in my life.

Death conversations are hard.  Before my cancer, those type of conversations use to take place periodically between Janet and I.  You know, the "growing old together" type of conversations. Janet would guess that we have around 20-25 years ahead of us , but I would always disagree and say it would be more than that, possibly as many as 40!

In reality, about 2 years ago, I had this strange, vague feeling inside me that I only had about 5 years to live.  Angels didn't come to me in my sleep and tell me.  I didn't hear voices either.  It was just a feeling and it led me to an urgency to get some things done.  I didn't talk about this urgent feeling or thought.  It's not something you announce at dinner or at a family gathering. I do have to wonder if it was around this time (2 years ago) that my cancer began.

The first thing I thought of when I had this sense of urgency was the need to organize the photos I had packed away in my office.  Gathering photos of my past relatives and telling their stories seemed important to share with living relatives.  Devoting my time to photos and similarily, to geneaology, was easy to do.  Even if I didn't believe in that vague 5-year feeling, it was something I had always wanted to do, eventually.  With this feeling I decided I needed to get on it.

To my surprise, discovering that I have a non-curable, aggressive cancer brings with it no predictions of how long I will live.  I've never asked and I like it that way.  My goal is to reach those years where Janet and I are sitting on a front porch, rocking away.  The encouragement comes from the pills I am on. They have shown great promise of stopping growth or slowing down similar cancers.  I put great hope in these pills that I might go into remission.