It will be a challenge to convince the pilot to make the trip, but certainly not impossible. We can make it from Kentucky to Washington state easily, and gain three hours in the time change. I’ll bring a few people, like my woman for loving, my friends for other companionships, my poor ma, and some kids for the learning experience along on the flight, and then tuck them all in safely in a motel once we have landed.

I would have my last meal in my office – since I spend most of my time there. But to cook I’d invite the Riviera’s Argentine chef Luciano “Lucho” Nardelli. My guests would be the architects who have worked closely with me: Pedro Ribeiro, Diana Radomysler, Suzana Glogowski and Renata Furlanetto; we’re working on a fantastic project in Barcelona.

I think I’d just like to be chilling out really, so it’s like real summer family holidays where the most important things to decide are what are you going to have for breakfast, what are you going to have for lunch, what beach are you going to, and what are you going to have for dinner.

I would need a terrible lot of cash because I’d have to go and give all the tramps that come off the beach and the homeless, leave lots of cash bundles because they sleep in the doorways, it’s terribly sad. Then I’ll rush home and tidy everything up and throw away all my old clothes and old shoes and take them down to the charity shop. It’s going to be very satisfying.

As far as I can tell, I’ll either succumb to some opportunistic infection, for which I’ve refused antibiotics in advance, or, having similarly declined forced feeding, I’ll starve to death. ... I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones.

He’s always been the family cook. He’s been feeding me since the day we met. Everything I know about Japanese food I know because of him. So now that’s another pleasure gone, perhaps the greatest. I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones. What it will do to Shin I can’t bear to contemplate.

So many times I’ve wondered what might have happened to me if I had lost my legs, or even just my right one, where my first melanoma appeared two or three years later. If I’d just been a second slower stepping away from the car, I might not be dying now. I’d be legless, of course, but still in good health. Of these fateful forks in the road are our lives made up. We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.

And of course, I wonder why I was not more vigilant about checking my skin, because if I had been, I would have picked up that first melanoma before it turned bad, and saved myself a lot of heartache. When I was first diagnosed, I was angry with myself for being too lazy and stupid to bother with anything but the occasional quick examination. But then I decided that kind of thinking was a waste of my time, because we start dying the moment we are born. I know that now. The knowledge has changed from a first illuminating but soon forgotten premonition into an undeniable lived reality.

How many times I could have died before now, and in how many different ways. And yet I came close only once: a speeding sedan ran a red light, hit three other vehicles, and jack-knifed into my rear wheel split second after I’d stepped out of my parked car. A bystander described the scene to me later. “You were a millimetre away from losing your legs,” he said.