Remember Me as a Writer, Not a Survivor

Not that death was a stranger. My poems tended toward death, death, death, pet death, death, sex, love, death.

Still, I was unprepared for just how unprepared I was to face my diagnosis. I would say it hit me like a train except that would describe the violence and not the despair, which was more like the embrace of a frozen corpse.

Ovarian cancer recurs frequently, and I could not shake the belief that no matter how well I'd done so far, I would not live long. Hoping for an edge, I asked the doctor about my cell type.

"Clear cell," she said.

"How does that affect my prognosis?"

"It doesn't," she said.