A quick personal update:

My mother was recently diagnosed (a week or two ago) with terminal bone cancer. She's been fighting the cancer for 7 years; it went into remission 5 years ago, but came back about a year ago and metastasized at various sites across her body. Her doctor recently decided that chemotherapy at this point would do more harm than good. She is currently at the hospital, being monitored as they switch her from one kind of pain medicine to another that will hopefully have fewer distressing side effects than the current one. They're hopefully going to discharge her some time this week, at which point we are going to set up hospice care in our home to make her as comfortable as possible.

They don't know how long she has, but the estimate is a few weeks to two months. She's already showing a lot of signs of the dying process beginning, subtle things but they are there nonetheless.

To my friends, I would have let you know sooner (and in a different format than this) but things have been so hectic lately that it's hard to keep track of who I've told and who I haven't.

We are fortunate to have a lot of neighbors and family friends who care deeply for us and are doing everything they can to help out during this tough time. I'm going back to school in a week and a half. I don't know how the quarter is going to play out; the hard part is that no one has a crystal ball to know exactly when she will pass away.

We all know that she's been sick for a long time, and in pain for a long time. At the outset of this--when the doctor first told her she was terminal--we thought we might have six months to two years. Not long, but long enough to have at least another Christmas or two. Now she just seems to be constantly going downhill, and it's hard to reconcile her alive and breathing with a funeral, with the thought of having only one parent. I know it's going to happen; it's just that it's also somehow completely beyond my realm of imagination.

They say anticipatory grief (grieving that you do prior to someone's death) is better than sudden grief (when someone dies unexpectedly), because you can have time to come to terms with it. In a way, I've been grieving for a long time over this. But that still doesn't make it any easier.