Saturday night

Saturday night Robin started to become agitated again. With the background about what "gotta get, gotta go" is all about we countered by starting to talk to her about how we understood that something was wrong, we understood she was sick, but there wasn't anything we could do about it. Robin immediately changed from being belligerent to being sad, but we were able to talk about it. I talked to her about how some people die young and some people die old, and there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to it. I recalled a television program about St. Jude's Children's Hospital which detailed the lives of many children who were treated successfully for childhood cancers, but many who also did not survive.

At one point she said the word "choice" and I asked what was her "choice". She said her choice was "to live". All I could say was that we have today and we "if we work at" (what the heck did that mean?) we could have tomorrow.

After some time we changed the subject and I began to talk about things we'd done together - she closed her eyes and listened. I talked about our bike rides locally along the rivers and out in the countryside, I talked about bikes rides through New York City (at an annual event with 30,000 cyclists), long bikes rides (sixty to one hundred miles), and rides out on Block Island and Martha's Vineyard. I talked about last Spring when we did a long organized ride North of Montreal and the various people we met. We didn't all speak the same language, but we still managed to meet engaging folks with whom we could share the passion for bicycling - even when communication was through pantomime.

As I talked she let me give her the evening medications and she drifted off to sleep (well, actually Kim said it might have been the droning of my voice which put her to sleep!).