My experience, my recovering:
There’s cancer to care for.
What’s good for me is she died in our bed,
sleeping delighted,
stunned day to day in our love.
And also, there’s Hitchens:
Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span.