Free I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 by Annabelle Gurwitch Page A

or two. Later it would make me apoplectic to hear people say, “It’s ironic that a grief facilitator gets cancer.”
    “Not really,” I’d counter. “That’s like saying it’s extraordinary when your doctor dies. What would be amazing is if they lived forever.”
    There was a certain excitement when she started the treatment, like the third season of a sitcom, when the characters face serious challenges but still fire off hilariously biting one-liners. It was just like Samantha’s breast cancer story line in
Sex and the City
, except Robin didn’t have a lavish wardrobe, designer shoe collection, sex, the city, or any chance of recovery. She did still have her sense of humor when she registered the domain name Tumor Humor. She was going to blog about coping with cancer through humor. Chemo was also a great excuse to purchase one or two new sweaters to attractively provide coverage for the port she’d need in her chest and cute fuzzy booties for good measure. Minus her gourmet cuisine and wine, her weight dipped precipitously, but we joked about how she was finally able to lose those pesky last
twenty
-five pounds.
    After only a few months we went from sitcom to Lifetime Movie of the Week. Robin sprung for a human-hair wig styled after Elaine’s
Seinfeld
season-six layered locks, so when her hair fell out, every day was a good hair day. Glowing from the chemo, she really had never looked better. But those good days didn’t last. Her feet swelled up and the comfy booties had to be cast aside. The new sweaters hung loosely from her shrinking frame, her skin began to turn dull and gray and she still hadn’t written more than a few paragraphs of Tumor Humor. Cancer? Not so funny after all. It was terrifying. For her. For all of her friends.
    Is there something growing inside me right now that will eventually kill me as well? I’ve always harbored an irrational resistance to washing off fruit. I’ve purposefully, stubbornly refused to rinse it off. Why on earth do I do this? What’s wrong with me? * Pesticides are undoubtedly eating away at my insides at this very minute, though statistically speaking, I will probably be bumped off by a teenage driver texting “What’s up?” or the last thing I will glimpse will be tile. My friend the futurist and author Dave Freeman had worked his way through fifty of his Hundred Things to Do Before You Die that he’d recommended in his book; he’d survived running with the bulls in Spain and land diving in the South Pacific, but was taken out by a fall in the tub.
    “The fifties are the weeding-out time,” my friend Arye explains. He serves on the pension advisory board of the actors’union. “We could never afford to pay pension and health-care benefits if so many people didn’t start dropping dead.”
    “Well, it’s comforting to know they’re serving a purpose for the greater good.”
    I’m a child of the 1970s: I saw
Logan’s Run
, I know that Soylent Green is people and that if we lived forever we’d be unfairly stealing resources that belong to future generations. But when it comes to giving up your seat at the dinner table, most of us prefer to linger for one more coffee and dessert.
    Robin wanted to hang on as long as possible, and she needed our help to make that possible. With no spouse, no children, she had only her friends, her chosen family. She didn’t want to return to New Jersey to her mother with Alzheimer’s, father with dementia and a strained relationship with her brother and sister-in-law. Isolation from her home and friends would kill her faster than the cancer and make any time she had left miserable, she reasoned, and the troops assembled. Neighbors began dog walking and handled the food shopping. Roommates from college, comedians and members of her wine group showed up to bolster her spirits. Her closest friends began coordinating and accompanying her to doctor’s appointments and chemo, and even sleeping over on a regular basis.
    I