Remember Me as a Writer, Not a Survivor

My oncologist's nurse found out I was a writer. "You must keep a journal!" she said. "I have nothing to say on this subject. I have no comment ."

"But it could help other women."

"I don't care about them," I said.

That was true enough in the first few months after I discovered I had ovarian cancer, but what I didn't say was that writing had long ago lost its glow. I often found myself remembering Marcel Duchamp's last painting, "Tu m' " ("You Bore Me"). Even my work as a film critic for the local alternative paper suffered. I was often tempted to write, "Go see it and decide for yourself."

If typing, revising and mailing literary manuscripts was tedious before, it seemed absurd now. Statistics gave me a 30 percent chance of living five years.

Breast cancer's five-year survival rate is more than 80 percent, so it should not have surprised me when I thumbed through a list of local support groups and found plenty for breast and none for ovarian. Then it occurred to me: of course, they're all dead!