The treatments sound worse than the disease, which will most certainly come back bigger and badder. If the tumours behave themselves, I’ve got a few years of pounding pain, whacked-out visual disturbances and generally feeling like I’ve been hit by the honey wagon. Radiation and chemo might give me a year or two more, but the side effects will probably make me wish I were dead. Once they start changing, I’ve got about eighteen months. And that’s with aggressive treatment and a hefty dose of luck of which I’ve never had any.

Dr. Divyaratna seems delighted to tell me that this is not as bad as it could be. “We will just have to wait and see.”

Which only makes me feel worse. I didn’t come all this way to wait and see. To wither into helpless, snivelling clod-dom while my mother’s hands tremble to hold my aching head and her own breaking heart together for years on end. To slowly disintegrate. I came here to say my goodbyes, sum up my life, and go down in a blaze of glory. Like a firework, screaming up into the backwoods darkness, shattering the night and the silence with my burning brilliance. If only for a moment. The idea of a swift and certain death held an odd comfort. The prospect of an uncertain life is far more unsettling. And even though on paper, I may now stand a faintly greater chance than that of an average ice cube in hell, there’s a familial pattern and a gnawing feeling in my gut that says I’m still pretty doomed. It’s just a matter of degree.

My Going Home To Die plan did not include a high school reunion on Thanksgiving weekend. But here I am, rifling through my old jewellery box trying to find earrings big enough to distract people from my bald and now slightly scarred head. When Allie picks me up, I wait for her to comment on the gaudy silver stars dangling from my earlobes, but she doesn’t. The drive over Ceilidh Mountain to Loch Bhreagh is remarkable in its silence. Allie keeps her eyes on the road. I take in the scenery.

This is the part of my downhome tale where I’m supposed to gush about what I see from where I sit, and maybe be grateful I even get to witness all this. The land and the sea. The turning leaves and the glorious colours. How it is all just. So. Beautiful. I’m supposed to draw the reader into my world with vivid descriptions of the landscape and the natural beauty, and then somehow draw a poignant connection between the rugged beauty of the simple land and the rugged beauty of the complicated people.

Well, you know what I see now when I look at those trees with the colourful leaves? Death. We glorify the bejesus out of the dying leaves. We’re all ooh and aah and gasping words like gorgeous and majestic while the poor leaves are just trying to eke out a few more sad weeks of being. By October, the leaves know. They know that one good night of wind, one lashing rain storm, and they’re gone. Unceremoniously flung to the ground to rot. Fall is a season of letting go. Of grief. Even though they manage to put on a bit of show for a while, what the leaves are really telling us is that those merciless, cold, dark days are coming. Pretty colours don’t stop you from becoming a corpse. So the mountain isn’t beautiful. It’s coloured with a hundred shades of dying.