It was never two years.

that’s how I ended my last post. I suppose I meant that two years is an unruly term limit -- too long for goodbye and too short for a career change. But then again, maybe I knew as I meandered through that post that my father wasn’t really going to get two years.

The follow up appointment was yesterday. The oncologist said there wasn’t a good treatment for this variety of cancer my father has, and he doesn’t like the way the conventional chemotherapy works in a person of my father’s age, with his disabilities. He’d rather not do it at all.

And he booked an appointment for January, but he doesn’t think that appointment will be necessary.

This morning, after a night of pounding rain, the sun has come out in New Jersey, and my mother says it’s “simply beautiful,” and that they are just waiting for X and Y to show up so that they can sign their wills, which “is rather bad timing,” she says.

Rather morose. morbid.

We’ve done cancer before.

It is always unkind. Always an unexpected turn. Always a hairpin turn on a wet road when you swear (beyond reason) that you are in control. And you never are. You are caught off guard, unprepared. All weather tires and a tune up be damned.

you say, “I wish I had more time.”

“I wish I’d ...”

that's what those of us who long for continuity get - reassurance that something in this unruly course of death is predictable: Those words.