Part One: Breathe In, Breathe Out

On trying to process imminent grief

“Do you think he knew why we did that? Like he knows I’m at death’s door?” she asks as we walk out of the bank.

We’d just met with a Wells Fargo associate to add my name to her account, another dispiriting preemptive task. I look at her with eyes that beg her to stop alluding to the inevitable. “Do you really feel like you’re at death’s door?” I ask, knowing we are close, but tediously in denial, hoping and praying the pathway to that particular welcome mat is still long and winding.

“No! Not today,” she says, convincingly, and I sigh, relieved.

The last 2.5 years have been exactly like this — one minute, consumed by dread and doom, the next, respite and optimism. Your textbook cancer-diagnosis rollercoaster. And yet, I am grateful for the ups and downs, the wild turns, the hands in the air, the whiplash, because at the very least, it means we are still on this ride together.

Later that evening, she snores on the couch. It is a deep, rumbly, unpleasant noise — one that used to mean (especially when we’d travel) that I was on the brink of losing hours of sleep. But now? Now it is the most comforting sound in the world. It means she is still breathing, she is still with me, I am still with her. We are inhaling and exhaling the…