Results tagged “death”

Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.

If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.

That includes my family and friends, and my parents Hilkka and Juergen Karl. My daughters Lauren, age 11, and Marina, who's 13, have known as much as we could tell them since I first found I had cancer. It's become part of their lives, alas.

Airdrie

Of course it includes my wife Airdrie (née Hislop). Both born in Metro Vancouver, we graduated from different high schools in 1986 and studied Biology at UBC, where we met in '88. At a summer job working as park naturalists that year, I flipped the canoe Air and I were paddling and we had to push it to shore.

We shared some classes, then lost touch. But a few years later, in 1994, I was still working on campus. Airdrie spotted my name and wrote me a letter—yes! paper!—and eventually (I was trying to be a full-time musician, so chaos was about) I wrote her back. From such seeds a garden blooms: it was March '94, and by August '95 we were married. I have never had second thoughts, because we have always been good together, through worse and bad and good and great.

However, I didn't think our time together would be so short: 23 years from our first meeting (at Kanaka Creek Regional Park, I'm pretty sure) until I died? Not enough. Not nearly enough.

What was at the end

I haven't gone to a better place, or a worse one. I haven't gone anyplace, because Derek doesn't exist anymore. As soon as my body stopped functioning, and the neurons in my brain ceased firing, I made a remarkable transformation: from a living organism to a corpse, like a flower or a mouse that didn't make it through a particularly frosty night. The evidence is clear that once I died, it was over.

So I was unafraid of death—of the moment itself—and of what came afterwards, which was (and is) nothing. As I did all along, I remained somewhat afraid of the process of dying, of increasing weakness and fatigue, of pain, of becoming less and less of myself as I got there. I was lucky that my mental faculties were mostly unaffected over the months and years before the end, and there was no sign of cancer in my brain—as far as I or anyone else knew.

As a kid, when I first learned enough subtraction, I figured out how old I would be in the momentous year 2000. The answer was 31, which seemed pretty old. Indeed, by the time I was 31 I was married and had two daughters, and I was working as a technical writer and web guy in the computer industry. Pretty grown up, I guess.

Yet there was much more to come. I had yet to start this blog, which recently turned 10 years old. I wasn't yet back playing drums with my band, nor was I a podcaster (since there was no podcasting, nor an iPod for that matter). In techie land, Google was fresh and new, Apple remained "beleaguered," Microsoft was large and in charge, and Facebook and Twitter were several years from existing at all. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity were three years away from launch, while the Cassini-Huygens probe was not quite half-way to Saturn. The human genome hadn't quite been mapped yet.

The World Trade Center towers still stood in New York City. Jean Chrétien remained Prime Minister of Canada, Bill Clinton President of the U.S.A., and Tony Blair Prime Minister of the U.K.—while Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Kim Jong-Il, Ben Ali, and Moammar Qaddafi held power in Iraq, Egypt, North Korea, Tunisia, and Libya.

In my family in 2000, my cousin wouldn't have a baby for another four years. My other cousin was early in her relationship with the man who is now her husband. Sonia, with whom my mother had been lifelong friends (ever since they were both nine), was still alive. So was my Oma, my father's mom, who was then 90 years old. Neither my wife nor I had ever needed long-term hospitalization—not yet. Neither of our children was out of diapers, let alone taking photographs, writing stories, riding bikes and horses, posting on Facebook, or outgrowing her mother's shoe size. We didn't have a dog.

And I didn't have cancer. I had no idea I would get it, certainly not in the next decade, or that it would kill me.

Missing out

Why do I mention all this stuff? Because I've come to realize that, at any time, I can lament what I will never know, yet still not regret what got me where I am. I could have died in 2000 (at an "old" 31) and been happy with my life: my amazing wife, my great kids, a fun job, and hobbies I enjoyed. But I would have missed out on a lot of things.

And many things will now happen without me. As I wrote this, I hardly knew what most of them could even be. What will the world be like as soon as 2021, or as late as 2060, when I would have been 91, the age my Oma reached? What new will we know? How will countries and people have changed? How will we communicate and move around? Whom will we admire, or despise?

What will my wife Air be doing? My daughters Marina and Lolo? What will they have studied, how will they spend their time and earn a living? Will my kids have children of their own? Grandchildren? Will there be parts of their lives I'd find hard to comprehend right now?

What to know, now that I'm dead

There can't be answers today. While I was still alive writing this, I was sad to know I'll miss these things—not because I won't be able to witness them, but because Air, Marina, and Lauren won't have me there to support their efforts.

It turns out that no one can imagine what's really coming in our lives. We can plan, and do what we enjoy, but we can't expect our plans to work out. Some of them might, while most probably won't. Inventions and ideas will appear, and events will occur, that we could never foresee. That's neither bad nor good, but it is real.

I think and hope that's what my daughters can take from my disease and death. And that my wonderful, amazing wife Airdrie can see too. Not that they could die any day, but that they should pursue what they enjoy, and what stimulates their minds, as much as possible—so they can be ready for opportunities, as well as not disappointed when things go sideways, as they inevitably do.

I've also been lucky. I've never had to wonder where my next meal will come from. I've never feared that a foreign army will come in the night with machetes or machine guns to kill or injure my family. I've never had to run for my life (something I could never do now anyway). Sadly, these are things some people have to do every day right now.

A wondrous place

The world, indeed the whole universe, is a beautiful, astonishing, wondrous place. There is always more to find out. I don't look back and regret anything, and I hope my family can find a way to do the same.

What is true is that I loved them. Lauren and Marina, as you mature and become yourselves over the years, know that I loved you and did my best to be a good father.

Airdrie, you were my best friend and my closest connection. I don't know what we'd have been like without each other, but I think the world would be a poorer place. I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.

My friend Jean-Hugues discovered he had the same cancer I do at the same time in 2007, in Paris, France, where he lives. He and his wife Laurence found this blog, and together we made our way through treatment in part by sending messages back and forth online.

But he got better. His treatment worked. He was supposed to visit this past December but was trapped in Europe by snow. Yesterday he finally made it for his first visit to the Pacific coast, staying at the nearby Hilton. I am much weaker now, but strong enough for him to sit at my bedside while we talked (well, I rasped at least).

He has spent these glorious Vancouver spring days traversing the city, and he showed me photos. My wife and kids are pleased he could visit too, visions of future trips to Paris drifting through their imaginations.

Today my mother made Easter dinner for 19 (!) people. She and my dad live next door, so after Jean-Hugues and I spent an hour or so discussing his day, we managed to join the party, and of course he could stay much longer than I could. While his English is excellent, he enjoyed speaking French with my uncle and cousins too.

I can still hear laughing through the duplex wall. I'm amazed JH would take time and spend money to see me, or that everything could come together as it has.

But it is our last chance, because it's my last chance, my last Easter, my final spring.

His flight leaves tomorrow. My father will drive him to the airport. It was brief but well worthwhile.

I'm still here, with a list of things that sometimes happen.

But first, I have three new rules, things that always happen, no matter how annoying...

Derek's Rule #1: There's always more poop.
Derek's Rule #2: There's always another phone call.
Derek's Rule #3: Even when "no one's coming to visit today," someone is always coming to visit today, maybe seven or eight people.

Fortunately, so far my wife Air has to handle only the last two. Here endeth the rules.

So, sometimes I'm hacking and coughing away, sometimes we get a proper motorized hospital bed installed in the living room for me, sometimes I'm up in the bathroom in the middle of the night after an entirely fictionalized dream about the Poet Laureate of the United States, and sometimes my wife and daughters and friends have completely renovated the basement while I've spent most of my time asleep.

Sometimes people deliver cases of Diet Cherry Coke at odd hours; sometimes the delivery is a care package with three cases, a nylon athletic bag, and clothes my daughters wear to school the next day; sometimes I crack a cold can of the stuff just to feel the bite of that first sip at 3 in the morning; sometimes it takes me ages to read through my Facebook messages and Twitter replies and blog comments and email; sometimes I'm frustrated by email lists that still won't unsubscribe me.

Sometimes Air and I acknowledge that we're distracting ourselves with all these other things, because I'm dying, and it's obvious now. And then we sit on the hospital bed, which is quite comfortable, and we cry.

I'm at the point with my cancer that the car has finally bumped down off the pavement and we're driving on gravel now. What I mean is, the end of the road is somewhere up ahead, not too far, and I'm not going back to smooth speedy travel, ever. To keep moving at a reasonable pace, I have to pay more attention to details, and a lot of stuff I previously took for granted requires effort—mine or someone else's. This has happened faster than I expected, but life often does.

Several doctors have helped me manage my symptoms, and the celiac block procedure I had last weeks seems to have helped with abdominal pain, for one thing. While my chest cough persists, it is not from fluid building up in my lungs. I am treating the cough, most often at night, with a drug that dries tissues out locally so I can more easily find a comfortable sleeping position. The Depends are doing their job too.

Both of my feet and lower legs are swollen, but that appears to be a regular consequence of my metabolism becoming wonky as the tumours interfere with my various bodily systems. The treatment? Elevate my feet, and wear super-tight compression stockings (I'll get thigh-high ones fitted in the next few days, ooh-la-la). I remain stupefyingly tired, especially on days like today when I decide not to take Ritalin to perk me up.

None of these symptoms will get much better. The only one that could is my voice, which has been nothing but a whisper for two months, but which I hope Dr. Anderson will inject or spray on April 25, and perhaps I'll be able to speak with my vocal cords again.

Real plans, for real. No really.

All the rest means that my wife Air and I are making plans, real plans, about what the next few weeks and months are going to look like. I am on the full B.C. Palliative Care benefits program—British Columbia seems to be in good stead when it comes to this somewhat uncomfortable specialty.

I have signed the official B.C. Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) form, so if I have a heart attack or other really drastic event, then my medical team—plus first responders and hospital staff—know that I don't have long to live, and don't want any overly-heroic treatments to keep me alive at any cost. In particular, there's no point in having me on a ventilator in intensive care when that space could go to someone who might make a full recovery and live a long life.

Emily the Burnaby Health Nurse comes again tomorrow to see what I might need here at home, so that I can stay as long as possible—and to determine who else on her team might be best to help my family and me figure that out. While Burnaby Hospital's Palliative Care ward is apparently extremely nice, and just down the hill, I'm not planning to go there.

Rather, we're physically preparing our house for me to live my last weeks to months here, and likely for me to die here too. Burnaby Health will even bring in a fully-adjustable hospital bed so I can set myself up comfortably.

Being the Decider

I may sound a little cold and matter-of-fact right now, but in truth it's surprisingly satisfying, even a bit joyful, for Air and me to be able to make decisions about how my life will end—and to know that these decisions will take effect not in some abstract future, but soon.

Personally I don't expect to live until autumn, and I don't know if I'll get very far into summer. But if that's the way it happens, I'd like to die during a beautiful Vancouver summer rather than one of our grimmer grey seasons. Once I'm dead there'll be no further experiences, so I may as well face a lovely city in the sunshine beforehand if I get the chance.

At the moment none of my doctors sees any particular single organ or physiological system as a big scary killer lurking to take me down suddenly, or with a series of cascading problems. More likely I'll continue to become weaker and more tired, and I may need some help breathing later. Then, eventually, weeks or a few months down this gravel road, I'll simply shut down, and I'll die. There won't be a Derek anymore.

That sounds like a decent way to go.

In case you missed my brief mention a few weeks ago, and its original posting back in 2008, here is a video that three Vancouver Film School students made explaining tsunamis (like the recent one in Japan) in a couple of minutes:

It's based on my 2005 article on the topic.

When I wrote about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami the day they happened, my post was optimistic, despite the obvious catastrophe. In many ways, things have turned out worse than they first seemed. Surely the situation in Indonesia and around the Indian Ocean was similarly awful at the end of 2004—and took many more lives—but we didn't have access to horrifying footage like this (watch the whole thing) to reinforce the point.

The argument I made, that Japan's position as a modern country with a robust infrastructure and vibrant economy, remains: unlike Haiti especially, Japan will bounce back quickly. Fewer people died or were injured than would have been in poorer and less-prepared nations from a magnitude-9.0 quake and massive sea wave. Those who are homeless and displaced will find safe places to live, and food, and comfort faster than in many parts of the world.

But the dead, officially more than 10,000 people now, are still dead. More than half that number again, over 17,000 people, are missing. Villages, towns, and cities are destroyed, some utterly annihilated.

Distracted from a disaster by a crisis

That enormity should remain our focus, but it is not. Because the cleanup and recovery in Northeast Japan is now an aftermath. And there is an ongoing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Since it is right on the ocean near the earthquake zone, I remain amazed that it survived the original quake and tsunami as well as it did, but ever since then, it's been hard to figure out what's going on at the facility: initially the situation seemed under control, then not. There were explosions. Things were going well, then poorly, radiation up, then down, in the soil, in the water, in food. Workers evacuated, then returned.

It's unclear to me how much of what has happened at the plant is an inevitable cascading consequence of the initial disaster, and how much has been made worse by insufficient information, poor analysis, bad decision-making, and incompetence. It is clear that news coverage of the nuclear accident, especially here in North America, has been remarkably poor, stoking worries while ignoring facts, and even confusing such basic distinctions as those between radiation and radioactive substances; between different types of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma); or between dosages and exposure rates (which is like forgetting the difference between miles and miles per hour).

Here are a three quick resources that I've found helpful:

1. XKCD's radiation dose chart and accompanying blog post gives you a sense of the scales of different exposures to radiation. It has some problems, but as a heavily simplified go-to guide, it will help you get your bearings.
2. Well-known blogger Anil Dash's father-in-law is a health physicist specializing in human radiation exposure, so Anil's post on the topic, while brief, provides some additional sane background on which to base your thinking.
3. The Christian Science Monitor (always a surprisingly good newspaper, despite how it was founded) has a good article on lessons from Fukushima about nuclear safety more generally.

It's about Japan, not about us

I'd also like to point out a few things for people here on North America's West Coast who are worried about radioisotopes carried here on the wind. Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Those were open-air nuclear detonations in Japan, and didn't affect people here. There were dozens and dozens of atomic-bomb tests in Nevada (many also open-air), practically in our back yards, and while some radiation levels were elevated, the health consequences have been immeasurable. The Hanford Site in Washington isn't even 300 km from my house, and is the most contaminated nuclear waste site in North America.

CT scans, flying in aircraft, and even living at elevation in Colorado yield higher long-term radiation exposure than any of these other things, especially on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Oh, and no matter what, taking iodine is of no help whatsoever: the radioactive varieties coming from Fukushima have half-lives so short they decay away (in addition to being dispersed) before even getting this far. Want protection from danger? Get a flu shot next year.

I'm neither an advocate for nor an activist against nuclear power. My main concern has always been that we really don't know what to do with spent fuel and other radioactive waste from the process (just as with nuclear weapons production), and we never have. "Just bury it" seems a paltry approach when we're talking about substances that could be dangerous for tens of thousands of years. We're still doing a poor job of burying the waste of just 65 years of nuclear production.

But we have an industry here and now, and it has its consequences. Let's at least try to understand and handle those rationally, and help Japan work with them, because hysteria won't make it any easier.

And remember the quake and the tsunami, and the 27,000 dead or still missing.

In 1991, I had finished my Marine Biology degree and was part-way through a non-fiction writing diploma at the University of B.C. On Spring Break in March, I visited my parents, who were then living in Toronto. I didn't feel well: tired, cranky, dehydrated, out of sorts in many ways. Each night, I had to go to the bathroom several times, which was unusual for me at the time. I was losing weight. My vision was a bit funny, and I was unusually hungry. But I was only 21 years old, in strong health, regularly riding my bicycle to school.

Perhaps I had a kidney infection, but I wasn't sick enough to see a doctor—I would wait until I returned to Vancouver. When the time came to do that, I was skinnier than ever, constantly thirsty, fatigued, and grumpy as I boarded the plane. I chugged free ginger ales the whole way back across the country. (I later realized this was a bad idea.)

Too sick to wait

I arrived on a Thursday, and was getting even sicker. I phoned my doctor's office as soon as I got home to make an appointment, but the soonest he could see me was Monday. I went to bed. And stayed there. I was too weak and tired to do anything on Friday or Saturday. My roommates were worried about me: they'd seen how much I'd thinned out while I was away, and how much weaker I was.

They decided I couldn't wait till Monday: I was too ill, and I was going downhill fast. They drove me to Burnaby Hospital's Emergency department, no arguments from me allowed. Within minutes of being brought past triage, a doctor smelled my breath and figured out what was going on: the distinctive sickly-sweet scent of ketoacidosis, caused by my body breaking down muscle and fat instead of digesting food.

It was almost certain that I had type 1 diabetes. Sometime in the past few weeks, my pancreas had stopped producing insulin, preventing my body from metabolizing the food and drink I'd been consuming. Glucose levels in my blood had been rising and rising, and every meal and sugary drink I consumed had been making things worse.

A quick blood test confirmed it. For normal people, glucose is dissolved in the bloodstream at concentrations between 4 and 8 millimoles per litre (mmol/L). (Some other countries, such as the U.S., measure in milligrams per decilitre, where those readings would be between 70-140 mg/dL.) That's normal, between 4 and 8. What was my reading that night in the hospital?

Thirty-two! Four times the highest regular reading, and almost off the scale for most consumer blood-glucose measuring devices.

I almost smacked my forehead. I'd learned about diabetes during my biology degree. I had every sign and symptom in the book. But it had never occurred to me that I might develop the condition: I didn't know of any family history, I was a strapping young guy, and yet I was actually older than most people who get the disease. It is an autoimmune disorder, where my own immune system attacked and destroyed the insulin-producing cells in my pancreas, and most type 1 diabetics first develop it around puberty, which is why it's also known as juvenile diabetes.

Learning to manage

But there I was, diabetic. The staff started giving me insulin, rehydrating me, and getting my electrolytes and other body chemistry back in balance. They started to explain diabetes to me in the simplest possible language, but I stopped them and asked if they could track down a textbook. Over the next few days I'd need to learn how to measure my blood sugars and inject insulin to control them, along with adjusting what, how much, and when I ate. Exercise and stress affect things too. I figured if I read some background physiology on the disease, I'd be better prepared.

Soon enough I was admitted to a regular ward, and soon enough after that, feeling healthy and starting to regain some weight, I was bored. But I still needed to learn how to manage my diabetes, something I knew I'd have to do the rest of my life. I learned as much as I could then (I couldn't leave the hospital without the basics), and more afterwards at various clinics over the years.

And for 20 years now, I have managed it. Through university, jobs, marriage, children, and especially during my cancer treatment—which diabetes makes even more complicated—I've been keeping my blood glucose under control. Not too high, not too low. I measure several times a day by poking the end of a finger and having a tiny meter read a drop of my blood. Enough insulin to handle my meals, but not too much. I inject that at least four times daily. Adjustments for exercise. Awareness of how it feels if my blood glucose suddenly goes low, and what to do about it (quick answer: down a can of Coke).

I always figured I would reach this 20-year milestone. Diabetes hasn't been cured, but modern treatments, with accurate portable meters and genetically-engineered insulin, make it easier than ever for us diabetics to live relatively normal lives.

While I haven't been perfect at the task, I've done pretty well, and have avoided any complications for two decades. One twisted consequence of my terminal cancer is that now I won't face them at all, since any complications that did arise would be decades away. I won't live that long.

Without those modern treatments, I would have died early in 1991, and never gotten married, had kids, started a blog, or developed cancer. That's certainly something.

Last night, at bedtime, I put the new Adele album 21 in my headphones and settled down to sleep. Within three songs, I was crying hot tears, my face scrunched up so I couldn't see. I couldn't stop. I didn't want to. I sobbed silently through nine more tracks and 40 minutes in the dark (weeping with laryngitis is one more weird experience), enough that I was worried I'd short out one of the earbuds.

Music, that most human of instincts and inventions, can do that at its very best: reach past our rational minds, through any analysis or cynicism, beyond any physical pain or discomfort, directly to our emotions. Then it can draw those feelings out and tap them to the surface, even (especially?) when we didn't know just what was in there. I've had it happen: listening to the astounding student choir in the auditorium at the high school where my wife works, hearing Stevie Ray Vaughan play "Little Wing" by Jimi Hendrix, a few transcendent moments onstage with my own band in front of crowds big or small.

But Adele's "furious tornado of a voice" (as Pitchfork's Tom Breihan called it) pierces me. She's half my age, British, and likes to hit the pub with her friends, but that voice and the conviction behind it are why she's also a number-one selling artist in countries around the world right now. She's the queen of heartbreak. Every time she comes on with little but piano as backing, like on "Turning Tables" or "Someone Like You," and "Hometown Glory" or Bob Dylan's "Make You Feel My Love" from her previous collection, 19, I completely lose it...

Hang on. Have to take a break here for a second...

Heartbreak

Sheesh. It's like I'm a mopey '80s teen wallowing in my room to Robert Smith and Morrissey (and, back then, I wasn't). The funny thing is, Adele has a Cure cover on the album ("Lovesong"), and while it's very good indeed, it doesn't have the desperate edge of the original. I don't know whether it's the riff, or the way Smith sang "I will always love you" in 1989, but he made it clear that the love wasn't coming back, and maybe never got there to start with.

Adele's own songs often do accomplish that, in spades. Let's take one. At the end of her staggering BRIT Awards version of "Someone Like You" (the live recording went straight to #1 on the British charts), the announcer says something like, "You don't need dancers and pyro and lasers, do you?" Basically he's telling all the other acts at the awards, from Rihanna to Arcade Fire, "This girl can kick your ass any day of the week." And he's right. I'm sure she knows it, but whenever I've seen her end a song, she appears like she has to shake it off a bit, then she looks off to the side slightly, as if thinking, "Was that me?"

But there's a more subtle part of the performance that's worth examining. Here are the lyrics for the chorus:

Never mind, I'll find someone like you,
I wish nothing but the best for you, too,
Don't forget me, I beg,
I remember you said,
Sometimes it lasts in love,
But sometimes it hurts instead.

At the BRIT Awards and at every other live performance I've heard of that song, Adele sings the first four lines in the same, strong, high part of her vocal range, then pulls it down a little for the last two. It works great.

The moment

But listen to the version on the album. I think it's slightly too fast, but here's what I guess happened: producer Dan Wilson asked Adele to try something different in the chorus, to sing the third line ("Don't forget me, I beg...") higher than her normal range, where it almost cracks. It's not an unusual technique for even great singers to try straining on purpose, maybe creating some of the finest moments in popular music. (Think of John Lennon on the Beatles' "Twist and Shout," Roger Daltrey on the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again," or the entire careers of James Brown, Janis Joplin, and AC/DC.)

For Adele, that moment, right there, the one line—"Don't forget me, I beg"—is the focus of the song, the crux of the album, the very keen point of the ice pick when it first hits the diamond and shatters it, the moment of heartbreak.

And here's why it, and the rest of Adele's songs, made me cry like that last night. There's the heartbreak of rejection, of unrequited love. There's the heartbreak of breaking up, of losing love. There's the heartbreak of getting dumped, of not being loved anymore. They ache, they seethe, they're horrible. That's what Adele makes her business singing about.

But worst of all is the heartbreak of having been in love, for years, and both of you still being in love. But one of you is going to die. And no one, neither of you, not anyone else, can do anything about it.

That's not what Adele is singing about, not directly. I hope she never knows how it feels, or if she does, that it's many, many years away. I didn't invite her voice there, but it seems to know, so when it breaks down my barriers and taps the depths, that's where it goes, and what comes out.

Right after the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami at the end of 2004, I wrote what turned into a long article about it, and about tsunamis more generally. People found the piece useful, so following today's devastating 8.9-magnitude quake and tsunamis in Japan, I thought I'd point it out again, particularly my general introduction and the Q&A section later on.

Today's situation is different, of course. Damaging tsunamis seem to have been largely restricted to the coastline of Japan itself; Hawaii and the rest of us around the Pacific Rim saw comparatively minimal effects (the wide-open coasts of southern Oregon and northern California seemed to get the worst of it), if any. And Japan has probably the world's most sophisticated earthquake and tsunami response system, as well as the most stringent seismic building codes. Many hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people died in Japan today, and there will be vast costs in rebuilding—but in 2004 the death toll around the Indian Ocean was over 230,000. Last year's Haiti quake, of far lower magnitude, killed hundreds of thousands too.

As a measure of how much modernization has changed things, as recently as 1923 over 100,000 died in the Kanto quake, which was not nearly as strong, but also generated tsunamis. Remember that when people (as they inevitably will) start talking about the relatively low death toll from today's events as "a miracle": it was only a miracle comprising knowledge, understanding of history and plate tectonics, planning, engineering, construction, communications, discipline, and other sorts of hard human work.

The low cost in lives and injuries does not, however, diminish the pain and suffering encompassed in each of those lives. It does not make it easier to witness one's house or office destroyed. It does not clean debris from a formerly vibrant seashore, or put out a raging fire, or comfort an orphan.

It does tell us one thing. We have another reason, among many, to diminish poverty in the world. Because when a natural disaster strikes—indifferent, in itself, to the wealth of its victims—those who are poor are least prepared to face it, and more likely to find themselves under the rubble than figuring out what to do once it's cleared away.

A dying man can wish for many things, but one of them might be to have a party with many family and friends: like a funeral, memorial, or wake, but actually being able to be there, before he dies. That's exactly what my wife Air put together for me a couple of nights ago, on March 3. We had a "living wake" at the newly-renovated Waldorf Hotel in East Vancouver, with a couple of hundred of the people in our lives joining us for a great Lebanese buffet, lots of mingling and chatting, and some fine live rock-n-roll music from my old bandmates and me, as well as my friends in Vancouver's legendary group Odds.

We couldn't throw the invitations wide open because fire regulations restricted how many people were allowed in the grand tiki-themed room in the Waldorf's basement—and we wanted to make sure that the people who came really were those I knew, and didn't get crowded out. After all, it was a wake, not just a party. Luckily, we didn't have very many uninvited door-crashers (and a few guests missed out because of flu and other illness), so we stayed within the limit, and it all worked out.

A dress-up crowd

Amazingly, in fact, few people I wished I could have invited if I'd had contact info, and others I never expected to make it, showed up anyway. Some I hadn't seen in many years, or came from very far away, so that was a nice bonus too. There were family members I've known my whole life, and friends I've had for 10, 20, even close to 30 years. I think I had a chance to say hi to almost everyone. My apologies to the few of you I missed.

Most of them had their pictures taken in the photo booth set up by the awesome Miranda and Reilly of Blue Olive Photography. There are other pictures appearing on Flickr, YouTube, and elsewhere (such as blog posts) with the tag penmachine, with more to come (if you have any from the event, please use that tag yourself). You can also tag pictures and videos with my name on Facebook. We had this slideshow projected on the wall all night too:

I was shocked at how well I survived the evening. I did plan carefully: I took the right combination of medications at the right times, napped in the afternoon, avoided eating too much during the day, and simply ran on endorphins until almost the very end of the evening. During dinner I went upstairs and ate in the hotel room we booked, lying on the bed, to recover some energy. Then, after far more stints on the drums than I thought I'd be able to tolerate, I finally burned out and announced to everyone that I needed to lie down, then disappeared to let them wind things down. I paid for it afterwards, and all the next day, but it was entirely worth it.

Speaking of that announcement, yes, I still had (and have) complete laryngitis. Through the PA system, I rasped out a very few words, sounding like Christian Bale's Batman in The Dark Knight. Out on the loudness of the floor, I was completely inaudible unless I whispered directly into people's ears. I sometimes resorted to typing stuff out on my iPhone for them to read. It was bizarre and frustrating, but somehow appropriate—it was like being a speechless ghost, drifting in the semi-background at my own wake. It also kept anyone from trying to monopolize my time, since I couldn't engage in any serious conversation.

The thank-you brigade

Others made up for it. My wife Air coordinated the evening (and avoided crying, somehow), the guys in the band cracked the usual jokes, and there were four extremely short and touching speeches from those close to me: my friends Tara, Dennis, and Johan, and my (pregnant!) cousin Tarya (MP3 files, between 1 and 4 minutes each). We had tremendous help from my parents Hilkka and Karl (he made the slideshow too), our friend Steven, current and former members of The Neurotics and other bands I've been in, Pat and Craig and Doug from the Odds, the staff at the Waldorf, and our kids Marina and Lolo, who couldn't come because of B.C.'s stupid liquor laws, but who kept themselves and another friend's daughter entertained at home until we got back late.

My biggest thanks, of course, go to Air. It was all her idea, and her work that made my living wake happen. She has kept our family going through my four-plus years of cancer, through surgeries and fear and chemotherapy and a prognosis of death. She made this party happen now, while I could enjoy it and join my friends and family, instead of after I die when I can't. We've been married more than 15 years, and I've said before: that is not nearly enough.

Thank you, too, to all of you guests who could come. I'll remember it my whole life. I hope the rest of you will remember it even longer.

It's March 1, and spring approaches. What was I thinking about in the previous 10 years on this date? Since my blog is now old enough, we can find out:

• 2001: I had just re-joined my old band.
• 2002: I highlighted some of the websites I worked on, and an online style guide I didn't.
• 2003: I waited a few days, then spewed out stuff about digital cameras, earplugs, software piracy, cheap pens, and the Editors' Association of Canada.
• 2004: I went on one of my regular rants about how human brains misunderstand statistics.
• 2005: I marked the death of Jef Raskin, irascible pioneer of computer interfaces.
• 2006: The bizarre and unlamented iPod Hi-Fi, women in science, and the Internet as oxygen.
• 2007: I learned a good lesson about painkillers.
• 2008: I almost passed out in a messy and embarrassing way.
• 2009: A fantastic drive to Tofino on Vancouver Island.
• 2010: The fun-yet-schockingly-lame 2010 Olympic Closing Ceremony.

It's unlikely I'll live until March 1 next year, so that list should now be complete.

Dying from cancer means being a little bit less alive every day. That sounds weird, and it is. But I look back six months, for example, when I was still tromping around the mountains up in Whistler, driving down to Seattle, and taking hundreds of photos of my cousin's wedding—and I couldn't do any of those things now. Yet there's no obvious mark of when each one became out of the question.

I suspect a lot of "last things" are like that: they pass by as every previous one has done, and you don't realize until later that you'll never do them again. I knew long ago that I'd likely never go scuba diving or skiing again, but that was still well after my last dive and ski trip. When I didn't bring my bicycle out of storage last summer, it occurred to me that I'd probably taken my last ride the summer before. Sometimes it is obvious at the time too: it was clear when we visited Disneyland recently that I was unlikely to see California again afterwards.

Beyond that, I've found myself less interested in some of my main hobbies. I'm winding down my involvement with the Inside Home Recording podcast, in part because I'm too ill to keep hosting, but also because recording music at home doesn't interest me much anymore. I haven't released a new tune online in almost two years, in fact. (I think what I really enjoy is playing music live, and I've been unable to perform a full gig since late 2009.) And after accumulating a bunch of cameras and lenses, I'm not taking very many photographs these days either.

It's not that I'm giving up on all the things I like, but that I have to admit when they're no longer enjoyable or physically possible. Sometimes, for instance, my big SLR camera really does feel too heavy to lug around, which it never used to. Still, I never seem to tire of writing, whether on this blog or in little bursts on Twitter and Facebook, or in comments on other people's sites.

Writing is the creative act I've practiced the longest, in fact. I remember enjoying it very early in elementary school. It's why I started this website back in 1997, to promote my nascent freelance writing and editing business. It's what's made me most of my living for my entire adult life.

So I keep doing what I can do, whittling down to the core of both what I like and what I'm still capable of. Facing my own illness and death is clarifying. The less possible or important things burn off, or I let them drift away. What's left is as much of me as I can keep going. A little less, but still me.

By all accounts, my maternal grandparents were a vibrant and social couple, pillars of Vancouver's substantial Finnish immigrant community in the middle of the 20th century. By the time I was born in 1969, they had reached retirement age, and I never knew them as young, healthy people. We lived next door, and as I got older I knew them as quiet as they aged and became ill, with few friends. They didn't travel much—a few trips to Reno in my childhood—nor did they go out or have parties, other than family gatherings.

After talking with parents, aunt and uncle, and cousins, I think a big part of that change was pride. My grandfather, a carpenter by trade, also led a Finnish choir. As he became less firm, he could neither do his old work nor sing the way he used to. I think he resented that. He did not want his friends and their families to see him become old. So he slowly withdrew, until he no longer kept in touch with most of them.

Finns are often stereotyped as extremely reticent and reserved, and like many stereotypes, it emerges from the truth. (There's an old joke: a Swede and a Finn go together to a bar. "Cheers," says the Swede as they raise their glasses. "Did we come to talk or drink?" replies the Finn.) My grandpa, who came to Canada in the 1920s, was certainly like that when I knew him decades later.

I also know how he felt. Four years after developing cancer, I'm tired, weak, and in pain. I've lost close to 50 pounds. I spend a lot of time in the bathroom, and I take morphine daily. I'm dying, and I know it. While I'm only 41, I'm like an old man, and I'm often by myself, frequently by choice.

There's a big difference, however. My grandparents both died in the early '90s. Neither had ever used email or anything related to the Internet. Conversely, I've been involved in some sort of online social networking since my BBS days almost 30 years ago. Email, this blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr—they're a bigger part of my daily life than the telephone or television.

So even when I'm here, alone with the dog, somewhat withdrawn, as on this grim rainy Vancouver Friday, I'm not really alone. People like you read what I write, and you respond. I keep track of my friends and acquaintances, and some rare days I know more about what's been going on in the lives of friends in Melbourne or Ottawa than with my parents next door (though my dad's on Facebook and has a blog too). I can simply lurk and feel part of people's days, or I can inject the occasional reply or snarky comment, depending on how I feel.

What I do feel is connected, in a way my grandparents didn't at the ends of their lives. Unfortunately, my grandma spent her last years in a care home, in the final stages of Parkinson's disease, not understanding much of her surroundings, and often reverting to memories of her youth in Finland. My grandpa, though, was pretty sharp until very near his death, when his lungs gave out on him.

I think grandpa would have benefited from something like Facebook or Twitter—some means to stay plugged in with his family and friends, and their families and friends. It's a new thing in our time, this ability to dip into and out of the lives of people we know—if we choose—to remain the social people we want to be, even if our bodies won't let us do it so easily or frequently face-to-face anymore.

Cheers, folks. I can't drink much now, but I can still talk.

Christopher Hitchens holds some political views with which I disagree, but like him, I am a staunch atheist. Last summer he found out that he, like me, has stage 4 cancer, which will probably kill him, again like me, fairly soon. He has talked and written a fair bit about it, eloquently of course.

Most recent is this video interview (with text transcript, via Jerry Coyne), where he talks almost entirely about his cancer and the prospect of his own death. He still finds time to tear into Mother Teresa, though:

He says many things that mirror my own thoughts. However, perhaps because his cancer is so much more recent, he still thinks a treatment might come soon to keep him alive. He also still wants to contribute to treatment experiments, regardless of whether they might help him directly, which something I have decided I no longer want—I have suffered enough in four years.

Hitchens realizes he might never again see his native Britain, because travel is becoming more and more difficult. He acknowledges that, even if he were to know how many months he might have left before he dies, he'd need to know what kind of months those would be before he could decide what to do with them. He talks of profound weakness, of undertaking a simple task one day that might have been impossible the day before, and might be impossible again the next. All give me pangs of recognition.

He and I have never met, or spoken, or communicated in any way, but I feel kinship with Christopher Hitchens. He is 20 years older than I am. Yet we are both on a short road to our deaths, which will be our end, and we both know it.

My younger daughter Lolo turned 11 today. She shares her birthday with my cousin Tarya, as well as Wayne Gretzky, Ellen DeGeneres, and Australia.

The year I was 11, back in 1980–81, the Iran-Iraq War began, The Empire Strikes Back ruled the box office, Ronald Reagan became U.S. President, the Space Shuttle Columbia made the first-ever orbital shuttle flight, John Lennon was shot dead (and Reagan and Pope John Paul II nearly so), Terry Fox died, Voyager I passed Saturn, Walter Cronkite retired, AC/DC released Back in Black, and "O Canada" officially became our national anthem. I was attending the same elementary school Lolo does now, and my family got our first personal computer, a borrowed TRS-80 Model I with 4 KB of RAM and cassette-tape storage.

Will this be as momentous a year? No one knows yet. Sadly, though, it is unlikely I'll live to see Lolo's next birthday in 2012.

Happy birthday, not-so-little one.

Yesterday I met my friend Bill for lunch, and as we were ending our visit, he half-jokingly pledged that, after I die, one way he will honour me is to avoid typing two spaces after a period in his writing. I posted that to Twitter and Facebook, and was surprised at how many people report still using two spaces after sentence-ending punctuation, something that is typographically wrong. Coincidentally, the same topic showed up at Slate and at Andrew Sullivan's blog too.

If you're a convinced two-spacer, please pick up any professionally-typeset publication: a book, a magazine, or a newspaper. Here, for instance, are bits from Yann Martel's award-winning novel Life of Pi (left) and an article from this month's Marie Claire magazine:

Look at the end of each sentence: one space after a question mark, period, or other sentence-ending punctuation. No multiple spaces anywhere. So, unless you handle nothing but personal correspondence all day long, chances are that the vast majority of everything you read each day, prepared by people whose job it is to know what they're doing, uses single spaces. And, chances are—even if you use two spaces in your own writing—you've never noticed the difference in publications or thought, "Gee, I wish there was more space after those periods."

I never took typing lessons, and always modeled my typing (I've typed pretty much every day for more than 30 years) on what I saw in print. So when I heard that typing students were compelled to use two spaces, I thought, Why the hell would you do that? And while people who do it have given me all sorts of reasons (beyond, "that's what my typing teacher demanded"), none of them refutes these six reasons why you should only ever use one space:

1. The most common explanation for why two spaces were introduced after the end of a sentence is because of the fixed-width characters on typewriters, where they supposedly helped legibility. (I don't personally think so, but it's a reasonable argument.) However, few people today use fixed (a.k.a. monospaced) fonts: we type with proportional characters on our computers, and typographers long ago established that single spaces work better for proportional type. By the way, I'm typing this in a fixed-width font in my text editor, and I still don't find two spaces necessary or helpful.
   
   
2. As I've already noted twice, single spaces are what professionals use. You don't always have to follow authority, but the job of a typographer or page designer is to make words as clear, legible, and pleasant to read as possible. None of them use two spaces to do so. There are plenty of circumstances in life where large numbers of people, perhaps the majority, understand and do things the wrong way. Typing two spaces because it's "more professional"—like thinking that the Coriolis effect applies to bathtubs, or avoiding sleeping with a running electric fan because you might die, or writing email messages with lots of different fonts and colours—is a misconception and a mistake.
   
   
3. Even if you're laying out your own text in a word processor or page design program, single spaces automatically make text flow better on the page. That's because more than one space often creates rivers of whitespace that unconsciously distract your readers, reducing comprehension and slowing down their reading.
   
   
4. If you're publishing text on a web page—on a blog or wiki, in comments, on Facebook, or elsewhere—web browsers automatically convert any multiple spaces into a single space, according to the HTML standard. There are many reasons for that, both technical and historical, but the end result is that typing two or more spaces is simply wasted effort on the Web, because readers won't even see that you've tried. (Okay, you could take this behaviour as, "yay, I can type the way I want," but that's like never learning to spell because your word processor has a spell checker: you're asking for trouble when the machine isn't there to help.)
   
   
5. In my long experience as an editor, the simple fact is that in documents from two-spacers, sometimes there are two spaces after a sentence; sometimes there are three or four, or even more; sometimes one. No one who prefers to type two spaces after sentences, it seems, can actually make it happen regularly in real life. Every document I get from them that's more than a paragraph or two long has inconsistent spacing. I don't know if that's because people hold down the space bar too long so it repeats, or sometimes only hit it once instead of twice, or if the extra spaces end up migrating around as writers copy and paste sentences and phrases in their document. It doesn't matter. I've learned that the first step I must take with any manuscript is to search and replace multiple spaces with a single space. The text I receive is always a mess in that respect, and the simplest way to clean it up is to purge multiple spaces, wherever they are.
   
   
6. I'm asking you to do it. This topic originally arose because Bill thought (correctly) that I'd appreciate his changing how he types spaces more than, say, bringing flowers to my memorial service, or myriad other ways people might pay their respects to me when I die. Better yet, you can make the change now, so I'll appreciate it while I'm still alive! That's right, I'm playing the cancer card and giving you a guilt trip about typing two spaces. If I'm willing to do that, this must be pretty important to me, right?

Since words have been my living and my interest for so long, I have plenty of staunch opinions about other matters of English grammar, style, and punctuation—from different types of dashes to the serial comma, from split infinitives to positioning prepositions. However, in most cases, I simply prefer that you be consistent, even if you choose differently than I would.

For me, typing two spaces after a period is a mistake. It's like smoking: an unfortunate bad habit. While I'm glad it doesn't have such drastic health consequences, it's still a pity so many people learned the practice as kids and continue to follow it when there are many good reasons to stop.

As far as I know, there have only ever been two assassinations of politicians in Canada: the shooting of federal Father of Confederation Thomas D'Arcy McGee in April 1868, and the strangulation of Québec Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte after he was kidnapped during the October Crisis in 1970.

If you're American, that might help explain why we outside your country are so mystified (as well as saddened and horrified) by the bloodshed that has for so long accompanied political discourse in the United States—once again last week. Like the U.S., we have criminals with weapons here: gangsters who shoot up restaurants and busy streets in drug wars; ruthless home-grown terrorists who blow up airliners; men willing to kill their wives or girlfriends or daughters out of anger or spite or a twisted sense of honour; unhinged gunmen who walk into schools. We're not a peace-draped utopia in the Great White North.

A border with a real difference

And yet, the homicide rate in the U.S.A. is three times what we have in Canada. (We do get our cars stolen 22% more often than Americans do, however.) While 70% of murderers in the U.S. use firearms, only 30% in Canada kill with them—roughly the same number that use knives. Guns are harder to get here—both legally and illegally—and the types of weapons and ammunition a private citizen can own are also much more restricted. A mere 2.3% of Canadian homes have handguns in them; nearly ten times as many households own rifles and other hunting-style long guns. A little over 5% of the Canadian population has a valid firearms license, though many more owners remain unregistered.

It's reasonable to guess that there might be as many as 10 to 15 million firearms in Canada, mostly long guns. By contrast, authorities estimate more than 250 million guns in the U.S.A., with roughly 14 million purchased each year. That's something like twice the number of guns per capita (the U.S. population is about ten times Canada's), and more guns bought annually than exist at all north of the border.

Politicians in Canada—especially the Prime Minister, members of the federal Cabinet, and senior ministers in the provinces—certainly have security details. Some may need them more than others, but there's little sense that seeking high political office entails risking your life. None of Canada's 22 prime ministers since Confederation in 1867 has been assassinated, and it's hard to say if the one attempt on Jean Chrétien in 1995 (an intruder with a knife in the PM's official residence) really was one.

No revolution, and Mounties

Like the U.S.A., Canada was (and is) a country of the frontier, with our own Wild West and subjugation of native people, our own hurly-burly industrial-age expansionism, our own 20th-century shift to urban living in polyglot cities. But there was no Canadian Revolution or Civil War. For centuries, the rules and infrastructure of much of our vast country (especially that Wild West) were maintained by the Mounted Police and the Hudson's Bay Company. Our national slogan is not "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but "peace, order, and good government." We have no gun lobby with anything like the influence of the National Rifle Association.

We have not, in general, turned even the most heated political disagreements into a brawl, or a skirmish, or an internecine war. At rallies or campaign stops, bodyguards' eyes may skim nearby grassy knolls and rooftops, but there has almost never been anything of interest to see. No one in Canada can walk into a store and buy an extended-clip Glock semi-automatic pistol, then put it under his coat, take a cab to a rally, and shoot a Member of Parliament in the head—along with however many bystanders he can hit with his extra rounds.

Nor, does it seem, is anyone inclined to. Whatever the complex stew of influences that prompted alleged assassin Jared Loughner to follow those steps in Arizona last week—delusion and derangement; pervasive rhetoric of government and its agents as the enemy, perhaps even treasonous; easy availability of high-capacity, rapid-shooting handguns; much we don't yet know—the mix north of the border is different.

All but settled

I get little sense that America wants to change its mix, despite losing several important leaders over its history, despite both accidental and intentional gun-related deaths and injuries in the tens of thousands every year, and despite the counter-examples shown by Canada and similar successful western democracies with strict gun laws and generally less violent political rhetoric.

As cartoonist Tom Tomorrow put it, with a U.S. gun-control advocate (a masked penguin) talking to a U.S. gun-rights advocate (a guy in a suit): "The gun control debate is all but settled—and your side won. The occasional horrible civilian massacre is just the price the rest of us have to pay. Over and over again, apparently."

I'm seeing a doctor at the Cancer Agency for a followup appointment today, almost exactly four years to the day since I first found out from my family physician that I have cancer, in January 2007. Back then I was freaking out, but nevertheless I didn't think the disease was as severe as it turned out to be. No one did. We thought we'd caught it early, but we hadn't.

When I left work for my first surgery in February of that year, I thought I might be gone a few months at most. I've never been back, and I won't be. The company has had numerous employees join, work there for a pretty long time, and leave again, all in the time I've been away. (Indeed, there aren't very many people remaining from when I did work there.)

There was a time when I counted the days I'd been under treatment, but I stopped that ages ago. I simply lost count, but I can calculate it out. From my arbitrary Day Zero at the end of January 31, I've now been a cancer patient for 1438 days. Or if you take my diagnosis on January 8, 2007, then I'm now at Day 1461.

In that time, lots of other people have developed cancer—such as Steve Dorner, creator of the Eudora email application. Some—including my online friend Jean-Hugues in Paris, France—have gone into remission or been cured. Some, like actor Patrick Swayze, were diagnosed, had treatment, and then died from it, all while I was still chugging along.

So my cancer has neither been a worst-case scenario of swift and painful death, nor a best-case scenario of quick treatment and cure. I've managed to stay alive for four years, though my chances of reaching five in 2012 are slim. I haven't become an expert on cancer as a disease, but I have become an expert at having cancer.

And having cancer is strange, because it is my own body betraying itself. The tumour cells aren't invaders: they are my own, with my DNA, malfunctioning so that they've lost the ability to be productive parts of my physiology. They won't stop dividing and multiplying, and they do nothing else. So far my medical teams and I have kept them from overwhelming the rest of the cells in my body, so that my lungs and heart and kidneys and liver and intestines and brain and other organs are still working—mostly.

But eventually, like a car that's rusting out, things will start failing, and then I'll die. I'm a lot less angry about that than I used to be, because being angry for four years would have been terribly corrosive in its own way. It's been tough enough emotionally already, on me and on my family.

Some of the people I know continue to be convinced that I'll recover somehow, to say that of course I'll still be alive next Christmas, to imagine that I'll get better, or at least continue chugging along some more as I have so far. But to me, they are like the many people who continue to hope that I'll have some sort of religious conversion, or that I'll suddenly believe in their evidence-free miracle cures. That is, they're doing it for themselves, not for me.

Saying that of course I'll still be around next year is a lie, and I don't like lying to myself, or being lied to because it's supposed to cheer me up. It's possible for me to survive another year or two, but it's unlikely. I could also become a famous rock star or win the lottery, but I shouldn't expect either one, or live my life as if I will.

If you want to say that I'm not near the end of my life, you may do that, but understand that it's for your benefit, and to allay your own fears, not mine. I'm the one who has this body whose cells have gone wrong, and I can feel what it's like. Let's not deny it and pretend that I'm not, okay?

It's an odd thing, looking out on what will probably be my last year. On television news shows yesterday, reporters were asking people about their resolutions, their hopes and dreams, their expectations for 2011. If I'd been one of those men on the street (though I wasn't feeling well enough to be on the street), my answer wouldn't have been what the TV crews were expecting.

"Hmm," I'd have said. "I have terminal cancer. So my hopes are that my wife and kids get through this year okay, because I'll likely be dead by the end of it."

Chances are indeed very strong that I won't be alive to write a new year's post in January 2012. The cancer's moving too fast for that. And the past few days, I've really been feeling it, physically. Through our Christmas events, a family holiday in Victoria, and especially yesterday, New Year's Eve, I felt crappy, weak, gassy, in pain.

Now, everyone feels ill from time to time. My wife and daughters were sick too, with my 12-year-old, Marina, even getting a throat infection while we were on Vancouver Island. But what's different when I feel ill is that I always have to wonder: will I get better?

Today I am feeling a lot better, so far, and I hope it persists. I slept in late (a good sign, meaning I didn't wake up early needing morphine), took the dog out in the yard, had some coffee, and now here I am feeling energized to write something, which certainly wasn't true yesterday. Today's plans include taking down the Christmas tree and setting up the massive electric slot-car racetrack my wife bought me, which has been half-assembled for a week.

Eventually, though, I'll get sick and feel bad, and it won't improve—not enough. Part of my mind is always watching out for it. The cough that doesn't subside. The aches that my current medication won't address. I've never been prone to clinical depression, but I also have to keep an eye out for that, because it runs in my family and could generate fatigue and hopelessness too—but it could be treated if I get it.

I'm already considerably weaker than I was for our trip to Disneyland in July, or my jaunt to Gnomedex in August. I've lost a lot of weight, which I'm finding hard to regain, and I find the prospect of driving myself down Interstate 5 for a few hours nearly impossible to imagine.

But, compared to yesterday, when I couldn't see myself going to the grocery store, or walking the dog around the block, or hauling the Christmas decorations downstairs—well, compared to that, I'm much improved. There are little tipping points everywhere, and my family and I never know when I've crossed them permanently. Not yet, anyway.

Years ago, on Apple's defunct iCards site, I found a photo that remains my favourite image for Christmas Eve:

I don't know who took it, but I hope that tonight you are as warm and cozy as that picture feels. Christmas Eve is the night that my family has always held our big dinner and celebration, European style, and that will be the case again this evening.

There is also a sad component. Three years ago, on Christmas Eve, my friend Martin died suddenly in his sleep at age 39, so I think of it also as Martin's Eve.

Finally, chances are that tonight will be my last Christmas Eve: in December 2011, my family will gather again for Christmas. But by then, most likely, I'll be dead. I don't want tonight to become a maudlin event because of that, but it is the truth—and at least we all know that now. It's something I've wondered about for three Christmas eves now, and I feel a little relieved that it's become less of a mystery.

Christmas isn't a religious event for me, but a family one. Whatever it is for you, I hope yours is comfortable and happy, like the photo.