Morbid thoughts of a former Girl Guide

This blog is almost the only writing I've been doing, which bothers me; I'm at a stage where I feel I should be doing some more personal writing, writing for myself, dealing with private thoughts that I wouldn't necessarily publish here. I've now been dealing with this cancer situation for four months, and my perspective changes constantly. After a 10-day period of total panic right after the diagnosis, in which I assumed I was about to die, I calmed down and recognized that I may have a few years. Later it was suggested that I could be cured, although the definition of metastatic breast cancer, which is what I have, is that it's incurable.

But the doctors have been so vague about everything, primarily because they don't really know what's happening with my bones. I'm regretting that I didn't have a bone biopsy of my ribs. If there were bone mets, and the chemo worked, will they simply do another CT scan and find that the spots they saw before are gone? Will they wait until after radiation treatment to do the scan?

Because at no time have the doctors been willing to "stage" me. I don't know if I'm a Stage 4 cancer, which is the worst, or what. In the meantime, Dr. Lee says she is doing what's called "pseudo-adjuvant" treatment, which I really don't understand -- she makes it sound like she's treating the cancer as a new one rather than as a recurrence. So I don't know how to plan my life. Will I live to receive my pension? I am assuming it's unlikely, and I must admit that as time passes, I'm getting more used to the idea that I will die in the next five or ten years if not sooner. Will thinking that make it so? These are thoughts that I need to explore.

Although I don't feel great, I don't feel like I'm dying, and I do have a lot of time on my hands to do some of the things that I want to do before winding up my life, things we all say we'll do one day if we have time. Of course, part of that is simply cleaning junk out of the house to make it easier for those who'll have to take care of my household after I'm gone, and also in anticipation of the day when, if I live long enough, I may choose to scale down and move to an apartment. I should be throwing out all those old magazines, and what do I do with that small collection of naughty letters from old lovers? I read a terrific short story in Esquire, I think, some years ago, can't recall the author, about a man dying of AIDS who, after he ended up in hospital, instructed his friends to purge his apartment of sex toys before his mother arrived, a hilarious and touching piece.

I was a Girl Guide and "be prepared" comes naturally to me.

But what other secrets does one want to take to the grave? For me, preparing for death has mostly to do with leaving behind some trace of myself for my niece and nephews, since I have no children, and more important, some traces of my family and the world in which we once lived but which is a mystery to them. I have taped interviews with relatives that I want to convert to digital files and even transcribe (especially important right now are tapes of my dad talking in a way he can't do today because of his dementia); I want to photograph and log items in my house so that whoever cares will know that this tchotchke is something I bought on a trip to the Soviet Union, and that clock belonged to my grandparents, etc. I'm also working on compiling my magazine journalism, and maybe this blog, into a self-published book for the four people in the world who might want to read it one day. And, as I'm sure is true with so many people, all those digital photos are begging to be properly archived and snapshots to be inserted in albums.

My father, especially, inculcated in me the compulsion to log and date things; he never had time to write much, but he was always going around the house secreting little labels of provenance in his terrible handwriting on pieces of furniture, and writing details on the backs of photos. He was very involved with the local museum in Massey. And my mom has painstakingly kept up to date our family details using the Family Tree Maker program on her computer.

I want to write more about my family, but I'm blocked by what secrets I think they should know and what should never be revealed. As a writer of personal journalism and a person who is clearly not very private, the urge to tell all doesn't always seem appropriate. The egotism and self-indulgence inherent in thinking that the world will want to know anything about me when I'm gone is sometimes hard to fathom. I've just finished an interesting novel, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, in which an elderly man who's lost all connections in his life and who hoards things in his apartment, says, "At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived." The man turns out to have been a thwarted writer as well, and ends up leaving his words behind in a twist that moves the book along rather entertainingly.

Is it folly to try to prove that my life was larger than the one I actually lived? Will I even have time for any of this preparation? I know that when the worst comes, there'll be more pressing things to do; I've watched my friends who've died, and I know how it goes.

These are the things that are going through my mind. But I'm so lazy and tired that by 5 o'clock every day, after returning emails and doing a little house tidying and blogging and maybe some excercise and chatting with my mom and visiting with friends and eating and taking a bath and resolving whatever medical-treatment-related problems are happening that day, all I really feel like doing is playing solitaire and watching Law & Order.