father
My dad has three to six months left to live. My sister and I got the news over the weekend, preceded by a discouraging call from my mom saying she had some "news" about my dad. It turns out that the brachytherapy he'd started last year (as the laser ablation treatments were proving less and less effective) had greatly damaged his liver and that the cancer was now spreading rapidly. I could immediately tell, as we all sat at the kitchen table, that my parents had some serious things to say. I sensed a slight jump in my heartrate but didn't find tears until later that night, my eyes closed and hearing nothing but death's door hovering closer and closer, now more tangible than ever. My dad was very calm about delivering his sentence -- to him, these past 27 years with liver cancer were all a bonus on top of the life he'd already had: growing up in a Japanese-occupied Korea, escaping the violence of the Korean War by travelling south by train and leaving behind f...