In another, I am lying among the wildflowers, my face bathed in sunlight, eyes closed, a knowing little smile on my face. My hair is fanned out around me, one arm slung casually above my head.

I can hardly believe it’s me. I look the most beautiful I have ever looked.

I immediately forward the email to everyone on my contact list, of course, and for the rest of the afternoon enjoy the ping of replies as my friends and family admire the photos. My mother replies to say she’s going to get one blown up and put on canvas, which is a bit over the top but does make me feel good. I can’t stop looking at them. It is me, but the best version of me I have ever seen. The thought that even once I am gone these images will still be here is a good one.

I never even considered writing a bucket list after the first diagnosis, because I was going to beat it. That was all I would allow myself to think. Positive. Writing a bucket list would be like admitting there was a chance otherwise, and I refused to do that. Even when I was at my sickest, the treatment wreaking havoc on my physical body, taking me to what I imagined was the very brink of death, I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it.

Now, with the cancer back and the outcome inevitable, I still can’t do it. There are things I wish I’d had the opportunity to do, sure. Given a life untouched by cancer. But as simple as it may be, I want to spend the time I have left with my loved ones. I want to give them memories of me to last their lifetime. I don’t want them to forget me. It’s an irrational fear because I know they won’t, but that’s the thing I fear most. Being forgotten.

Chapter Twenty-One

There was a lady in my first support group who I was particularly drawn to. I’m not sure why. She was in a different phase of life, a few years older than me, married and with young children.

Maybe it was her attitude, her determination not to take things so seriously. She would roll her eyes at inappropriate times, like when someone was being overly weepy and self-pitying, and I would get the giggles and have to stifle them, usually failing and drawing the silent ire of the support group leader, Irene.

The lady, Lisa, would say things like, “Christ on a bike, if the cancer doesn’t kill us, these rock-hard muffins will.” Then she’d tap one on the edge of the table for emphasis, and I’d be set off giggling again.

“Do you think they reuse the same tea bags every week?” she’d whisper to me. “This tastes like weak piss.”

I found myself sitting next to her each week, attracted into her orbit of no nonsense. Asked about her cancer, she’d reel off the facts in a clinical manner. Both breasts were gone, and good riddance to them, the traitorous pair. Reconstruction? No. Not needed. Her husband adored her with or without tits, and she didn’t need to fill a shirt to feel like a woman. She intended on getting a chest tattoo instead, once the scars healed enough. A big lion’s head to represent the warrior she was, and when she described it to the group I could tell she enjoyed the horrified reaction from some of the more traditionally minded women.