Sometimes, I think I am quite alright about it all, really. Well, not alright, exactly, but, you know, adjusted. Or something. I have accepted that it is a fact, and I have accepted that the sun still gets up in the morning, and the weather still changes, and the year still cycles around, and the spring flowers continue to come up as the days lengthen once more and the summer draws closer, even though it seems to me as if there should be some permanent sense of change, some reflection of the fact that you are no longer in this world. And then… then I hear a piece on the radio (today it was Ravel’s ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’, which you spent so many hours learning when you were preparing for your performing diploma while I was being a teenage delinquent and leaning out of the bathroom window, cigarette in hand) and I’m floored once more by the overwhelming unfairness of it all, an incomprehensible sense of loss, of sorrow, of pity. It’s as if it happened last week, yet at the same time it seems like another lifetime since I saw your face, heard your voice, looked into your eyes. I can’t believe this is really it – you’re never coming back, and, if such things happen, the next time I see you, an entire lifetime – my lifetime – will have passed between us, and I shall, if I avoid joining you in your fate, have become an old woman.

I worry, too, about what may yet happen. Not just for me, though I admit that as I get older, that frightens me more than it once did – I am not a hero, and pain is not something I relish. No: my fear is for my daughter. Will I too do this to her? Will she sit, a twenty-something child, watching her mother die and knowing there is nothing to be done, no way out, despite trying as hard as one possibly could? And will she talk to her daughter, telling her of the things that we did together when she was little, when I was alive, before that daughter was even thought of? Will that be my end? I know that part of your anguish as you realised what was coming was the horrible sense of déjà-vu – your mother, when you were fifteen and she was thirty-nine. I have had the tests that made sense. I carry neither BRCA1 nor 2. Yet the geneticists tell me that new genes may still be discovered. Where does that leave me? Will these breasts, which now nourish my daughter, comforting her when she is ill or unhappy or just lonely, be the thing which carries me off this mortal coil, dividing us for who knows how long? Will cancer ever just fuck the hell off, and will it do so without having taken me out in the process?

It’s been a long day, and I miss you. And, too, I miss my father. Sometimes I feel so very grown-up, and it’s not altogether a good thing.

(This post brought to you courtesy of an exceptionally maudlin moment which will pass shortly, no doubt; I don’t normally give in to this sort of feeling, but some days, it just gets me while I’m not looking, if you see what I mean.)