I wish you were here.  There are a thousand things I would say to you and you would nod in silent understanding.  Because you have always simply understood.

They say laryngeal cancer.  And now I understand it's just a vague term we use for the random, overproduction of certain cells.  We categorize because humans must.  But we understand so little about the disease.  And each of us responds to it and the archaic treatments we provide in such a different way that it is difficult for me to feel calm about this.  It is difficult for me not to feel panic and fear and terror and multitudinous other out-of-control emotions about what is to come.

There will be radiation and sickness and an inability to swallow.  And maybe he will be here when it is all done.  But maybe he will linger, momentarily, before disappearing from our lives forever.  And forever is such a very, very long time.  And I don't know what that absence will do to those I love.  I don't think they will be the same afterward.  I don't think they will be okay.

Because the death of family is something that changes the world forever.  It becomes slightly less full than it was.  There is an absence, a chair which was once filled at the dinner table.  We move on because we must but perhaps not willingly.  The world takes on a different hue, a darker one.  And every memory, however beautiful, is marked by the absence of shared experience with the one who was lost.  Everything that person is not there for is touched by a sadness, tinged with a sense that things are somehow incomplete.

I worry about those I love because I wonder if they will be capable of being the same afterward.  I dread the pain which will become all of ours during the grueling physical incapacity of treatment.  I dread watching those I hold most dear walk this journey with an outcome which is far, far from certain.