I’ve started and discarded a multitude of pieces over the past weeks. some, for sure I can’t connect to them. They’re meaningless blather for all that they flowed from my fingers.

I suppose I could write about the puttering. I’ve been painting things, like rooms and trim. I’ve been organizing as well: half the garage is now home to a future dump run, and I’ve been back and forth to the thrift stores half a dozen times.

I buy too much and hold onto it for too long. It’s a hereditary problem. My parents hoard too, though they don’t think so. My mom apologized for her belongings recently. Now that I’m not going to be here. Now that your father’s is going to be alone. I get quite angry with her. Not about the death talk: pretty much the only thing you can do for the terminal is hold space. About the apologizing. About the living small.

Because if there’s ever a time to eat cheesecake for dinner, it’s when you have metastatic, stage four lung cancer.

(It’s always a good time to eat cheesecake for dinner.)

I’m living how I want to all of a sudden, or at least closer to that desired location. It’s spillover from being adjacent to limited time, I think.

I went with Mom to the radiation oncologist meet and greet. They’re not starting radiation yet, but it’s coming. It’s palliative with lung cancer. He was a lovely doctor, from South Africa. I’ve met numerous medical professionals from there and have liked most very much. They seem to do better with patient interactions.

Medical technology is amazing. What we can see in the human body is almost beyond belief. We watched her heart beat. The PET scan shows heat, among other things. Every heartbeat lookeded like a supernova, a glowing yellow explosion in the centre of the screen as the cardiac muscles contract (you view things in a much slower down fashion). It was miraculous.

The tumours glow red. They’re not as hot as the heart, but they’re metabolically active and growing fast. Immunotherapy has been abandoned. We are at time-saving chemo now. They say maybe a year.

Regret would be an avalanche if you let go.

Life goes on. I replace range hoods in my kitchen and talk about DNRs with my parents while trying to remember that I have adult children to parent as well.

It feels like the inside of my head has been taken over by whirling dervishes. Any external calm is a function of willpower and good acting.