Really? Okay, if I have enough time I might go to Switzerland and drink the drink. I believe in euthanasia. What we do for our beloved pets, we should be able to do for our beloved humans or ourselves.

I don’t care as long as Jeffrey and I go together and we end up in a big suite with a view of the ocean.

When I am ready. When I have had enough. When I can no longer give anything. When I can no longer appreciate the small beauties. Without pain or remorse.

Quickly and by surprise. I don’t want the specter of death to linger.

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.

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.

I move from my bed in my bedroom, to my sofa here in the living room, and basically I stay here and I'm fed delectables all day and that's about it.

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.

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.