Hello! To many of you, welcome back! This is not the message for which you'd probably been waiting—I didn't finish the book, and I'm not resuming the blog. Instead, I'm dying.
(To those finding this blog for the first time—Hello! You're just as welcome to be here, and there are plenty of entries that aren't about my inevitable, imminent death, if you're not into that when you're trying to research Beethoven's deafness.)
We'd known early on that this could only be a short-term blog given how deadly cancer is when it hits Stage IV, especially in the brain. I kept going so long as I still had ideas—and I still do!—but the lesions in my brain have made it difficult to find the right words when writing, and the periods of lucidity between chemo cycles have gotten shorter and more painful. When it got to the point that I wasn't feeling any sense of recovery between chemo sessions, I declared my treatment over and asked to be given palliative care only. I'm living in hospice, responding to old friends, being visited by people I haven't seen in years, consuming more chocolate and coffee than I can handle (I'm working on that, for comfort's sake). My husband is taking leave from work and our son is off of school (which he would have been otherwise at this time of year), so ideally I'll get to die with them by my side.
