That last post was depressing, huh?

I thought, after that admittedly downbeat update, it was probably a good idea to post again just to let y’all know what is happening now, and how one deals with kind of heavy news.

First: you get therapy.

At the same appointment when my (amazing, incredible, world class) oncologist told me that it looks like chemo is starting to be ineffective, he organised referrals to the Psych-Oncology counselling service for me, my mum, and my partner. We’ve all had individual sessions, so far, and my counsellor has talked to me about the possibility of having a group therapy session for the three of us.

I’ve had therapy before, and I’m incredibly pro-counselling for ANYONE, because I think it can be profoundly helpful. So far what I’ve been calling “death therapy” has been a good outlet for me: I can talk about my fears, my feelings and just cry to a neutral party, without guilt or shame or feeling like a burden. It’s been a good place to kind of talk through what I believe, and for me to start thinking about what I want and need to sort out before I go.

Second: start thinking about getting your affairs in order.

Morbid? Maybe, but now organising my will and writing down my wishes for my funeral are pretty real (if not immediately pressing) concerns. I’ve had an unopened, unread Will Kit for AAAAAAGES…I’ve now at least read it and jotted down in a document directions for the distribution of my meagre estate. Having a lawyer as a partner definitely helps, as he let me know that having anything written down is considered enough, legally, in case I died tomorrow. Apparently the precedent is some guy dying in a car accident who wrote his will in his own BLOOD on the car door or something. I’m not that hardcore. Obviously it’s preferable to get a formalised will, signed by two witnesses etc, but it’s not like I have a huge fortune to leave behind. I think I’m okay.

Third: Try to adjust to the idea of dying.

This is the hard part. I’m not religious, not in the slightest, so I don’t have the comfort(?) of an afterlife to look towards; what I’ve always believed is when you die, it’s like….when you go under general anaesthesia. Like going to sleep, without dreams. Nothing. You just…stop being. There’s that law of thermodynamics about how energy can’t be created or destroyed, it just changes form, and so when you die, whatever energy made you you just….gets redistributed into the universe.

Here, let an actual physicist explain it:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed.

You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you.

And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.

-Aaron Freeman via NPR

I find that comforting. Sort of like death isn’t a hard END; it’s just a transition to a new state of being. My body will perish but my energy will go redistribute into the universe and I’ll be part of the rain and the wind and the stars and the earth and the trees and everything. I’ll be around.