To my mother’s delight, I also take her advice and give notice on my flat. To her dismay, I move into Kate’s instead of back home under her motherly bosom. I love my parents more than anything on this earth, but I can’t go backwards. Not now. I have to look forward. So when Kate suggested I move in with her, I jumped at the offer. Who wouldn’t want to live next to the beach? I made sure first, though, that she knew what she was in for. That it wasn’t going to be like one big house party and that there would probably be just as many bad days as good. I made her promise that if it got to be too much she would tell me.

I try hard not to dwell on the fact that this is most likely my final stop before hospice. It just doesn’t feel real.

Chapter Seven

The majestic colors of autumn bleed away into the barren starkness of winter. All but the most hardy of plant life withers and dies. I go into hibernation and watch it happen from my window, leaving the house only for hospital appointments and when my mother drags me to the supermarket to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. They, too, wither and die inside my refrigerator. I have no appetite for food and no energy to eat, let alone cook. I am bitter, and I can’t seem to shake it.

Why me?

Why again?

It’s too cruel to understand, though I spend hours trying. I am tortured by the things I haven’t done with my life. Things that weren’t even really possibilities until the possibility was taken away from me.

Sail the Atlantic Ocean

Climb Kilimanjaro

Cross the Sahara Desert on camel back

Raft the River Nile

Fly across the Tasman in a hot-air balloon

Kayak solo down the Grand Canyon

Hike the Appalachian Trail

I could have been an explorer. An inventor. In a parallel universe there is a Nobel Prize for literature with my name on it.

In another, I cured cancer.

I spend hours obsessively searching the Internet and compiling an exhaustive bucket list, which I then tear into a thousand tiny shreds and sprinkle out the kitchen window, watching as the wind carries them away like snowflakes.

I would have been happy just to be loved.

The oral chemotherapy does what it says on the box and drains me to new levels of exhaustion and lethargy. I don’t care if it drains me to the brink of death, as long as it takes the cancer cells as well. My skin dries out like a lizard, scaly and brittle. I slather it with moisturizer to no avail. I feel old and withered myself.

I end up admitted to the hospital twice. First, when the vomiting and diarrhea leave me dangerously dehydrated, and the second when routine tests show my blood count is low and I need a blood transfusion. The IV line blows a vein and I end up with a swollen and bruised hand. I tell the nurse she is a sadist. She looks at me sadly and says nothing, which makes me feel bad. Not bad enough to apologize, though.