You should be prepared for the worst — if that is at all possible.
The very idea of the fact that your days are counted, is extremely scary and dark beyond comprehension.
One of human life’s cruelest details is the notion of time.
Humans live under the constant tyranny of the clock: most everything we ever do is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years, and when time goes by, we become so good at “understanding” time, that it has become our greatest enemy without noticing.
And when the day comes on which we are told that we only have two months left in this life that we once thought would last forever, in this universe that never waits, we know only too well what “two months” really means.
Two months is less than one university semester. Two months go by from the birth of January till the end of February. Two months is eight weeks.
When my ex-wife had two months left, having lived for about four years with stage 4 breast cancer, the cancer had spread to the liver. First it had spread to the bones — cancer is a patient killer. We weren’t on speaking terms since a long time, but now and then we met through the electric mist, in supermarkets, sports venues and traffic.
It’s rather surprising how much you meet those people who you used to know.
She always looked okay to me, although I knew she was sick. But now she looked different. There was something wrong with the texture of her skin, which had a yellow appearance. And yet again, we did not speak, but the liver metastasis was painfully clear.
What struck me the most though was how empty she looked. As if her world was becoming smaller by the minute, and there was nothing left to stop that. I had no idea that this was actually the case. She was looking at her cell phone, but I had the impression that she did not really see it.
Time was ticking, and its sound had become too loud to see, to think, to breathe.
She was waiting for one of her kids in the sports venue (and I was waiting for my daughter), and I’ll bet she wanted the waiting last forever, just to escape the cold embrace. But nothing lasts forever.