The doctors say I’m dying in increments.

Not the normal way everyone dies—cell by slow cell, the inevitable march toward entropy that begins at birth. No, mine comes with a timeline, with percentages and probability curves. Stage Four. Metastatic. Inoperable.

Words that arrived on an ordinary Tuesday, somehow transforming the examination room into a time machine. Before diagnosis. After diagnosis. I am the same person occupying a different universe.

“Three to six months,” the oncologist said, her voice gentle but clinical. “Though some patients respond well to the palliative treatments.”

Some patients. As if there’s a lottery, and I might hold the winning ticket.

I begin keeping a list of things I never thought would be my last: Last time buying dish soap Last time worrying about retirement savings

It’s the mundane things that break me—not the grand moments I imagined would fill some hypothetical bucket list. Standing in the grocery store, I realize I’ll never run out of the 24-pack of toilet paper I just purchased. I abandon my cart in Aisle 7 and sit in my car, counting my breaths.

“I’m so sorry,” people say, their eyes performing the complicated dance of sympathy without pity.

“It’s okay,” I reply, a social reflex. But it’s not okay, and we both know it.

I find myself comforting others about my impending absence.

Time begins behaving strangely. Minutes in the chemotherapy chair stretch like taffy, while weeks vanish without memory or marker. My calendar, once filled with deadlines and dentist appointments, now measures life in treatment cycles and scan dates.

I develop a physicist’s awareness of time: how it contracts around pain, expands during moments of normalcy. The half-life of memory. The decay rate of hope.

My body becomes a geography I no longer recognize. Countries of pain establish borders with one another. Some days bring détente; others, full invasion.

Last Wednesday, I woke at 3:24 a.m. with the sudden certainty that I couldn’t remember what my mother’s voice sounded like. She’s been gone twelve years, and somehow I’ve lost this essential data. I scrambled for my phone, searching for old voicemails, videos, anything—but found nothing. Just like that, a piece of her has vanished.

I wonder what pieces of me will disappear first from the memories of those I leave behind. My laugh? The specific blue of my eyes? The way I always burned the edges of grilled cheese sandwiches?

“Are you afraid?” my sister asks over coffee. She’s the only one brave enough to ask directly.

“Not of being dead,” I tell her. “Of the dying part.”

This is only partly true. I’m afraid of the pain, yes. The indignities. The gradual surrender of independence. But I’m also afraid of the after—not in a religious sense, but in a narrative one.

The world will continue its rotation without me. The grocery store will stock new brands I’ll never try. My friends will develop inside jokes I won’t understand. And I will be a story that grows more distant with each retelling.

“Remember when she used to…” they’ll say, and the verb will never be in present tense again.

The half-life of grief, scientists say, is approximately six months. This is how long it takes for acute grief to decrease by half its intensity. Then another six months for half of what remains, and so on—diminishing to a manageable background radiation.

I find it oddly comforting, this quantification. Mathematics offers more comfort than platitudes.

I begin giving things away, methodically.

“Why are you giving me this now?” my neighbor asks when I offer her my barely-used stand mixer. I don’t have the heart to say: because I won’t be here to give it later. Instead, I tell her my kitchen is too cluttered.

It’s strange to curate your own vanishing.

The hospice nurse has kind eyes and a tendency to speak in the first-person plural.

“How are we feeling today?” she asks, as if dying is a team sport.

“We are feeling like shit,” I reply, and she laughs, which I appreciate more than sympathy.

She adjusts my medication, checks my vital signs, and makes notes in her tablet. “You’re doing well,” she says, which is hospice-speak for: you’re dying exactly on schedule.

Night brings the most acute awareness of mortality. 3 a.m. thoughts spiral: What happens to consciousness? Will it hurt at the very end? Will anyone remember to water my houseplants?

By morning, I’ve either reached profound cosmic understanding or just exhausted my capacity for existential terror.

The strangest part: I’m still paying bills. Renewing subscriptions. Buying multivitamins in bulk because they’re on sale, as if my body will need nourishing decades from now.

Some animal part of me refuses to accept the timeline. The brain is perfectly capable of understanding mortality in the abstract while simultaneously rejecting it in the concrete.

I start leaving notes in random books on my shelves. Nothing dramatic—just observations, reactions, the occasional argument with the author. Evidence that I was here, that I engaged with these ideas.

Maybe someday someone will find them and wonder about the person who wrote in margins. Either way, I keep writing.

The half-life of a secret: I’ve been writing letters to be delivered after I’m gone. Not sentimental Hallmark moments—I’m not leaving wisdom for graduations or weddings.

These are ordinary letters. Updates on my condition. Complaints about hospital food. Jokes that occurred to me too late to share in person.

For six months after I’m gone, my sister will receive an envelope each week. Then monthly for another year. The final letter arriving five years after I’ve disappeared.

“Just checking in,” each letter begins, as if death is merely a change of address.

Some nights, I lie awake cataloging the sensations of being alive: The weight of the blanket on my feet. The sound of the refrigerator humming. The particular itch between my shoulder blades.

I try to memorize these experiences, as if I could take sense memories with me into nonexistence.

“Are you at peace with it?” my oldest friend asks during her visit.

The question irritates me. Peace suggests acceptance, surrender. What I feel is more complicated—a simultaneously expanded and contracted awareness. Every moment more precious and more ordinary. Time both infinite and desperately finite.

“I’m not at war with it,” I finally reply, which isn’t quite truth or lie.

The half-life of a body: after death, the complex proteins begin breaking down almost immediately. Cells rupture. Bacteria proliferate. Matter transforms.

The atoms that comprise me will disperse and recombine in new configurations. The calcium in my bones might nourish soil. The iron in my blood could become part of an oak leaf.

There’s poetry in this molecular diaspora, this atomic immortality.

My oncologist has stopped checking her watch during our appointments. This, more than scan results or blood work, confirms what I already know: the timeline has narrowed.

“We should discuss comfort measures,” she says, which is medical code for: preparation for the end.

I nod as if we’re discussing weekend plans. “I’d like to be at home,” I tell her. This small choice—where my body will be when it becomes only body—feels like the last significant decision I’ll make.

The hospice bed arrives on a Thursday. They install it in the living room, near the window that faces east.

My sister cries in the kitchen while signing the paperwork.

I sit in my regular chair, watching this furniture of dying transform my space. The bed looks alien and inevitable, a spacecraft designed to carry me to a destination I can’t comprehend.

That night, I sleep in my own bedroom. A small rebellion.

My sister has taken to reading poetry aloud in the evenings. Not the obvious choices about mortality, but poems about ordinary beauty: Mary Oliver on geese, Billy Collins on shoveling snow, Ada Limón on tomato plants.

I close my eyes and listen. This, at least, I can still do—receive language, create mental images, feel my consciousness expand to hold these borrowed visions.

“More,” I say when she pauses, and she turns the page.

Tonight, watching the sunset from my window, I realized something: I’ve been thinking about this all wrong. I’ve been focusing on the vanishing, the subtraction of self from world. But perhaps it’s the opposite—perhaps I’m being absorbed back into everything.

The boundaries between my body and the world growing more permeable. My particular configuration of atoms preparing to rejoin the universal dance of matter.

Not an ending but a transformation. Not absence but different presence.

This doesn’t eliminate the fear entirely, but it changes its texture, makes it somehow both more intimate and more cosmic.

I write this down, my handwriting increasingly unsteady. Another note to leave behind, though I’m not sure for whom.

Perhaps just evidence that in the half-life between diagnosis and departure, I was still reaching, still questioning, still stubbornly, improbably alive with wonder.

About the author:

Part of our Winter 2026 Issue. New stories, poems, and essays now through January 31, 2026.

Thank you for supporting our journal. Want to deepen your connection to our community of writers and readers? Please consider joining our email list, making a gift to our journal, submitting your writing, or purchasing our first printed collection, Tangled Lives.