Goodbye World
A few words on the end
There is no good timing for what I'm sharing today. Maybe a day that threatens World War III, or the cruel, erratic rage of an aging and incoherent dictator, or the unrestrained brutality of a masked army of nameless American brown shirts who offer terror, abduction, disappearance and death to anyone, anywhere - maybe a day like this is a particularly poor one to share something this personal, this ordinary. There is no good day or way to say it: I am dying.
This isn't an obituary. I'm not here to sum up my incomplete life. But I am here to share this with you, in my own words, while I still can.
First, let me get the most awkward detail out of the way. I don't have an end date or even a timeframe. The doctors say I have six months or less to live, and that's probably true. It's a good guess. But it's also a technical interpretation necessary for the purposes of medical insurance, another uniquely cruel American institution. Last month I stopped treatment meant to stop or slow the colorectal cancer that has spread, since 2018, to numerous parts of my body. I started hospice care. That means my care is now all about giving me as much comfort as possible for as long as I've got left. Some people go "into" hospice when they are at death's door, hours or days away from their last breaths.That may mean they check into a hospice ward of a hospital, and that's where they die.
That's not my situation. I've got more time, and I'm comfortable at home. I get out for walks and find ways to enjoy life as best I can. I have good days and bad. I don't know when I'll have my last. I felt terrible a few nights ago. I felt almost perfect last night. I felt queasy this morning. If I'm still alive and writing about anything a year from now, please don't speculate that this death news was some sort of mistake, or a scam, or that my survival was a miracle. Of course I'd love any of those options.
No, I'm not ready to die. My family isn't ready. I planned to do more with my life, and on good days - meaning the days when I feel good - I still want that. But no matter what I want, no matter what my many To Do lists suggest, I'm going to do less. My body is failing. Cancer is winning. I tried to stop it. I didn't. So instead, I’m doing this. I'm trying to stay comfortable, and I'm writing something.
I realized I was dying a few weeks ago, when the pain from the cancer in my spine and bones flared up after what had been several weeks of relative calm.
Even without too much pain, they were difficult weeks, because the last round of chemo and radiation treatment to my upper back, spine and larynx was especially devastating. It left me with a terrible sore in my esophagus that lingered for four weeks - a condition called esophagitis. It finally got better, but the pace of healing was like that of a fractured bone. Slow, imperceptible.
The sore in my esophagus made eating and drinking difficult. I got most of my calories from milk chocolate Ensure Plus, a meal "replacement" drink. The fact that I still find it tasty and appealing is a sign of how low I've sunk.
I lost roughly 15 pounds in April. Ordinarily that would be cause for celebration. Losing weight was never easy for me. I've been big, strong and XL my whole life. But I had already been on a steady decline for many months, starting in January when I had lung surgery and then a difficult recovery from an RSV infection. So weight loss is no longer a step in the right direction. I need to gain weight, and I can't.
My body is fading, my muscles are vanishing. I'm tired. I ache all over. I use a cane.
I don't know when I'll post this, or where, but I wrote most of these words on May 13, 2025, about a week before I stopped my "normal" care and shifted to hospice. I'm coherent enough to say something, to type what you see here, but not enough to say a lot. My body is slowing down. So is my mind. I can't concentrate on anything for too long. I can't type with the speed or flow that used to be as natural for me as breathing. I enjoy good days, endure bad ones, and I'm grateful for the moments when I can feel clarity about anything. I keep editing, revising, adding, deleting. There's so much I could say, but I don't want to digress into everything. The world is drowning in monologues.
I also don't particularly want to write about cancer. I've been living with it for more than six years. If you're curious about all that, here are some previous posts I shared with friends on Facebook earlier this year and in 2019.
This is not how I anticipated spending my 57th year. For the most part, I stopped working in January. That was meant to be the first huge step of early retirement which, as it turns out, will be brief and include little of what I hoped might be a stretch of time to live and truly enjoy life with my family. Jenny, Eli and Jeremy. I thought I had more time. I thought we had more time.
I planned to travel, and to write. I thought medical treatment, and continuing to "fight" the cancer, would go on much longer. I wanted to see and be part of Jeremy's move to Austin this summer, and I hoped to see him get his PhD there four years from now. I wanted to see and help Eli figure out his professional life, which is just getting under way - and to see him return to Spain, where he got his master's degree and thrived for three years after college. I wanted to visit him there. Many times. I wanted to move to Spain too. That was just one of Eli's many gifts to me. Madrid? Valencia? Malaga? Cordoba?I love them all. I really did want to move, or spend seasons there. Spring? Summer? How? Where? That was never a real plan, we've got a big goofy dog and great friends and lives we enjoy in Virginia. But it was a real fantasy. That's where my mind wandered, and it still does.
It wanders to many places. I also miss the American west, especially Oregon, where Jenny and I first lived together after college. I still wish I were well enough for another trip through McKenzie Pass, or back across Eastern Oregon to John Day Fossil Beds, Hell's Canyon and the Wallowa Mountains. Or back to Mary's Peak in the Coast Range. I was so fortunate to have a life that allowed me to know these places, and that I discovered and fell in love with them all with Jenny, and many of them with the boys. I know what a luxury and gift it was that I could do any of the things I did, that my shortened life was longer than many and richer than most.
I'm too weak and too tired for travel now. Along with starting hospice care in May, I missed Jeremy's master's degree graduation ceremony at the University of Virginia, which is just a couple of hours away from home. Jenny stayed with me that day. It was also our 33rd wedding anniversary. Eli went to the graduation ceremony for us - and he can't possibly know how much joy that brought me.
These past few months were nothing like what I planned, but being able to spend them with Jenny and the boys has been magical. It's terrible magic, unspeakably hard, a constant and relentless flood of emotions. But also a gift.
We're all dying, yes of course. Maybe my death will be somewhere far off, like yours, a blur in the future. But I know it's coming. My cancer groups on Facebook are an endless stream of introductions, questions, answers, celebrations and death notices.
Cancer is awesome. If it weren't so terrible, it might even be inspiring. Biology is astounding, and confounding. Our brightest minds still struggle to understand it, and extend it.
I find myself thinking, and saying, frequently: I'm sorry. There is a great deal I'm not sorry about. But also so much that I wish I could shield from others, and I can't, and that fills me with sorrow. A disease like this - dying like this - feels like such a burden on the people I love and want to protect. I want to shield them from this, from me, from pain, from watching me die.
At some point I will lose control of my body. I would like to control the timing and nature of my goodbye. I have shared with my family what I'd like that day to be like. I'm angry that medically assisted death is still unavailable in Virginia, and in so many other states. I realize, I get, deeply, that love includes pain, that pain and suffering are part of the deal. But this logic does not make the experience more tolerable. The math does not ease the feeling. Seeing Jenny's helplessness, and her pre-death grief, and her tears, and knowing that I can not change anything, I can't make this better, I can't tidy it up, make this all better - it's one more thing that's out of my control, like cancer and death, and I feel deep sorrow that I have brought this to the love of my life, and to our family. Jenny says she can not imagine living without me, and I understand that, I get it, because I can not imagine living without her.
The digital mess
When I die, nothing comes with me. But I've realized how much I leave behind. It's a mess. So much stuff, and accounts, bills, the ordinary mess of ordinary life, all handed off to Jenny and the boys to manage and untangle. I've been trying to clean up my digital legacy too - the vapor trail of all the things I've done and touched online. I've been online almost as long as anyone has, starting before there was a Web, or a web, or a www dot anything. I'm suddenly faced with a lifetime knowledge transfer, or let's call it half a lifetime, and that's impossible. I have no index. I can't ask chatGPT to sort out the crud in my brain and summarize the good stuff. It's almost all crud. When I'm gone, Jenny will see alerts and notices for things that make no sense, and that I will have no time or desire to explain - almost all of it useless digital and mental clutter. Such as: alerts to update some long-abandoned and useless app purchased years ago, and now I get useless update alerts forever. My inbox is full of such noise, which I ignore. But I know it's noise. My analog brain handles the filtering. For Jenny, it will be chaos, there’s too much and I'm too tired now to index or fix it. It's one more thing I have to let go, and also one more thing to worry about when I can't let go.
I've called this essay "Goodbye World" as a nerdy wink to everyone out there who recognizes the opposite of "Hello World." That's the default post in a fresh install of a new system, like Wordpress. I'm geeky enough to know that little bit of coder trivia, but not enough to know or bother to look up any deeper meaning or uses of the expression, which AI could now explain to me with uncertain precision. I like my nerdiness, even though it was never deep enough to make me anything other than what I am. I've had fun with computers and tech since I was a kid. That was a gift, along with living, walking on mountains, traveling through deserts, breathing deep the Ponderosa pine's luscious vanilla scent, and listening, almost every night, to Brian Eno's Apollo.
I'm sharing these brief words on death and dying because writing words, one after the other, is one of the few things I've ever done that felt natural. It’s why I became a journalist - not because I felt any special calling to be a journalist, or to facts or reporting; but because it was a way to get paid to put words together - to be a writer.
I also fell in love with photography as a teenager, but that filled a different creative space. I still love photography, and I love that some of my friends and family have enjoyed my photos. But that fulfills a different creative urge, a distinct mental space. Non-verbal. Emotive. Light, texture, shape, tone. It's a reflection of what I saw and felt at a time and place. A moment. A surprise. I've made some photos that pleased me, but I've never needed them to please anyone else. I loved that a few friends enjoyed some of my images over the years and asked for prints. That was one of the things I included on my retirement To Do list. Maybe I'll get to it.
We'll see. It's strange, or maybe not strange, that as I'm dying and struggling with the physical and psychic pain of the end, I'm still stuck in my head, in a ridiculous and endless planning loop. But it will end. That's new.
Dying isn't fun. But some of it is, including little moments with Jenny and the boys that I've realized are some of my biggest pleasures - like walks around our beautiful neighborhood, and watching TV shows together. We've been watching a lot of NY Mets baseball with the boys, a family ritual that is full of love. I haven't given up on smiles, joy or seeking beauty in these last days.
Public vs private
My To Do list for this time of dying is cluttered and confused. As I was / am in life. I'm doing my best to scale back, do less, and simplify. I'm also doing my best to accept that I have no choice.
I find it painfully true to form that as I'm dying I'm debating whether I should launch a newsletter, or a YouTue channel, or finally get serious about publishing books. I've started several.
As I lay dying, my brain buzzes over the ethical baggage and burdens of all the platforms and tech bros who control them, surveillance capitalism and my distaste for hustlers, hustle culture, and all the alpha hucksters who I was always too weak to fight.
I thought this might be the first of many new posts, a reboot or launch of something new, a return to writing about things that matter to me. To blogging. But that quickly led to anxieties I never had to deal with before, because my past public writing was on topics that you might call public thinking. I was never a memoirist and really I was intently the opposite. I shared personal news with friends on Facebook, but never in my public spaces and domains, like We Media.
But times have changed, and my perspective now includes where my digital artifacts will remain, or decay, after I'm dead. This leads to anxieties. This is a dark world in real life - we've got national leaders talking with straight faces about nuclear war. And yet the darkness may be deepest in the digital world. I'm bracing for scammers, trolls and I-don't-know-whats. Other than keeping quiet and avoiding publishing altogether - avoiding public thinking - I don't know how to avoid them.
So I don't know, we'll see what comes next. Confronting death unleashes a torrent of fears. This may be the start of something new, or the end. I'm living every day like that now.
I'm dying in a dictatorship. It's not a great time to be alive. But I'm glad I've got it.
