SHE WONDERED HOW many times a week he had to do this. Plenty, no doubt. At least every day. Maybe twice…three times. Maybe, on a big day, five times. It was the ultimate bad news, and he delivered it dryly, like Sergeant Joe Friday. He was a young man, but his was a tough business and he had gone freeze-dried already. Hey, the bad news wasn’t really a surprise! She…knew. Of course, you always hope for the best. She heard but she didn’t hear.

“What?” she offered timidly. She had hoped…for better. Geez! Give me a break! What was he saying? Breast and uterus? Double trouble! She knew it would be the uterus. There had been the discharge. The bloating, the cramps. The fatigue. But it was common and easily curable provided you got it at stage one. Eighty percent cure rate. But the breast—that one came out of the blue and that could be really tricky—that was fifty-fifty. Strip out the lymph nodes down your arm and guaranteed chemo. God! Chemo. The worst thing in the world. Goodbye hair—there’d be scarves, wigs, a prosthetic breast, crying your heart out in “support” groups. Et cetera.

“Mrs. Wilson?” The voice seemed to come out of a can. Now the truth was revealed and all was out in the open. Yet how—tell me this—how would it ever be possible to have a life again? The voice from the can had chilled her. To the core.

“Mrs. Wilson, your last CA-125 hit the ceiling,” he said. “I suspect that this could be an irregular kind of can…cer.”

Some off-the-wall kind of can…cer? A kind of wildfire cancer! Not the easygoing, 80 percent-cure rate, tortoise, as-slow-as-molasses-in-January cancer!

January. She looked past the thin oncologist, wire-rimmed glasses, white coat, inscrutable. Outside, snowflakes tumbled from the sky, kissing the pavement—each unique, wonderful, worth an hour of study, a microcosm of the Whole: awe-inspiring, absolutely fascinating, a gift of divinity gratis. Yet how abhorrent they seemed. They were white, but the whole world had lost its color for her now that she’d heard those words. The shine was gone from the world. Had she been Queen of the Universe for a million years and witnessed glory after glory, what would it have mattered now that she had come to this?

She…came to…went out, came back again…went out. There was this…wonderful show. Cartoons. It was the best show. This wasn’t so bad. True, she had cancer but…these wonderful cartoons. Dilaudid. On Dilaudid, well, you live, you die—that’s how it is…life in the Big City. It happens to everyone. It’s part of the plan. Who was she to question the plan?

The only bad part was her throat. Her throat was on fire. “Intubation.” The nurse said she’d phone the doctor and maybe he’d authorize more dope.

“Oh, God, please. Anything.”