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This Is Us
What It’s Like to Know You’re Dying
I’ve had cancer for 15 years, and I now see the exit door up ahead
My life with an incurable, progressive cancer now in its 15th year is always shifting.
It is almost (almost) easier — after so many years (15), after so many appointments (hundreds), after so many blood draws (beyond count) — to say out loud, “I now know what dying feels like and I now know that I am starting to die.”
I said that very sentence to my husband Warren over breakfast, much to my surprise and shock. And then I could not speak, because my voice broke and tears ran down my face.
Tears of longing and love and, damn it, sorrow.
Everything up until now has just been a rehearsal, lines from a play that I knew would be staged sometime in the future, but not yet, not now. It is not yet now, the immediate now of hospice and comfort care only. But it is the now of realizing deep in my core being that something essential is changing within me.
I have often paraphrased Atul Gawande’s magnificent, heartbreaking description of living with an incurable, progressive cancer such as the multiple myeloma I carry in my marrow. After Gawande notes that such a cancer can often come under control and the patient can…
