I try to remember

I try to remember my life a year ago, when I had no idea.  I try to remember when I knew this would be my life.  I try to count how many days passed between the knowing and the acceptance.  I try to remember the bad times, because they are just as important.  I try to remember the nondescript times, because those are the ones that will quickly be lost.

A few weeks before he died, I was looking at some of our pictures from our first summer, our Prague summer.  I realized that the details had already faded.  I cried.  "I will lose these days without you. What will I do without you to help me remember?"  I was looking at the first picture ever taken of us.  I thought a different picture was our first one, but it turns out I'd been wrong.  The little numbers on the back proved that this photo in my hands was our first.  We had never thought about it that way because Keith's eyes were closed, so it was never printed or framed.  Keith went through the pictures with me "Don't you remember..."? he said.  And he told me, again, the stories of those days.  Of the hikes and the chickens.  But already I've forgotten.  Even as I tried to concentrate, I was forgetting.  I try to remember hundreds of ordinary days.  But they are already gone.

When did I know?  I can't even remember that.  I didn't know when I stood in the kitchen and he told me it was cancer.  I didn't know as the clock ticked towards 2012 and for the first time in my life I tried to drag the minutes backward, tried to undo the ticking. I think it was when we watched a doctor look at a PET scan and say "oh no." But maybe it wasn't until I sat on a couch and Keith told me that the Oncologist had been blunt. "This is what will get you."