I flew to Phoenix this weekend to visit a friend who's dying of cancer. He was quick to remind me, however, that we all are terminal, that we all are dying. And certainly as I approach my forties this seems truer than it did ten years ago. But terminal cancer is terminal cancer, and his death seems much more imminent than my own.

His point is not lost on me, though. I realize that I could walk out my front door and get hit by a car. While I'm driving down the street, someone could speed around the corner and slam into me. For some reason this is much harder to imagine than his death, which I am reminded of by his already-shaved head and his loss of fifteen pounds. He is already beginning to look like a cancer patient even though his chemotherapy and radiation haven’t started yet.

"Sorrow" by Krzysztof Babiracki

I am particularly bent on being included in this process of dying. I am, for so many selfish reasons, adamant about him telling me the truth. I want to know what dying feels like, what the treatment does to his body, how he responds. My own father died of cancer when I was five years old, and he battled it for all but eight months of my life. But I don’t remember any of it. I was too young to know what was going on, and thirty-five years ago when people were dying, children were protected from the process. I’m sure that no one told me he was dying, no one told me he wasn’t going to live to see me grow up.

George, however, is clear about his illness. “I’m dying,” he’s told me more than once. He is a hopeful fatalist. In fact, now that he has recovered nicely from his first surgery, he’s rather certain about his fate. “I think I’m going to make my short-term goal of living until June,” he tells me. I want to believe him. “I’m even certain that I might make my next goal of living through the year.

“But,” he says, “the reality is that I am going to die of leiomyosarcoma.” (Leiomyosarcoma is a cancer of the gastrointestinal system.) When I look up this unpronounceable word on the Internet, the first thing I read is this: “The prognosis ranges from universally fatal to poor.” This is not good. I realize that he’s right. I feel helpless. I can do very little for him.

His wife, Joanne, bears the burden of worry. We both acknowledge the fact that women are better worriers. George continues to reassure Joanne that everything will be okay. Easy for him to say. He gets to leave the rest of us behind when he dies, while his wife and the rest of us are left to grieve. We’ll have to pick up all the pieces and move on. But moving on is something that doesn’t happen without great cost.

One of my daughters, Grace, died twenty months ago. There were more than plenty of pieces for my husband and me to pick up, and we didn’t just move on. We have found a way to live with the grief settling inside of our bodies. We do what most parents who lose children do—we keep moving forward; we raise our remaining children; we smile sometimes even when we don’t feel like smiling.

At first, we exposed our grief because we could not help it. Other people helped us pick up the pieces, caring for our living children, bringing meals to the house, and sheltering us when we felt exposed. But after a few months, especially after a year, people no longer could do much else to assuage our grief and mitigate our pain. They returned to their familiar lives and we were forced to learn how to live ours again. After a while we began to walk a bit more upright again, and we noticed that the slant of the world was not as great and didn’t seem so impossible.

But the truth is that our daughter is still dead. I won’t get to watch her grow up into the beautiful woman I know she would have been, and there is nothing that I can do about it. I am completely helpless.

Over the weekend, Joanne and I talked about how we’d prefer to die if we could choose the way. Right before Christmas, George’s kids from his first marriage received a phone call. Their mother had inexplicably died in her sleep. It has been a shock for everyone, though Joanne and I admit that for the person who actually dies, it’s not a bad way to go. They just lie down and never wake up again. Not a half-bad way to go.

I am able to acknowledge the gifts we’ve been given with George’s illness. Since we know that he’s going to die, we have the opportunity to tell him how much we love him. We’re able to process our grief with him. We get to share our surprise and sadness. We have the chance to say goodbye.

I didn’t say goodbye to my daughter. She was still inside of me, forming and growing. Eight months pregnant, I had just begun to let the idea of a third child sink in. I busied myself with the sweet chores of unpacking boxes of infant clothes, cloth diapers, and other sundry baby items. My other children enjoyed suggesting names, one of them hoping for a brother and the other dreaming of a sister. None of us even considered the possibility of death. Birth and death are two words that hardly belong in the same room, let alone the same sentence.

But there we were, all of us witnessing the birth and death of our child in the same moment. I was pushing and pushing, delivering a child while grieving her death. Now it seems like too much for a mother to bear, but I did it. I gave birth to Grace the same way that I gave birth to my other children. And then we began the long and difficult process of mourning. We are not done. A year and a half is hardly enough time to say goodbye to someone I barely knew but who I loved as much as my other children. I simply did not have enough time with her.

And that is what Joanne and I agree upon. There is simply not enough time. There never will be enough time together. We are all dying, and, hopefully without sounding sentimental or clichéd, we have to enjoy the moments when we can. We must learn how to live present in this life.

One way to do this is to let the process of dying be okay, by talking about it when we need to instead of trying to hide from it. It is through these conversations about dying that conversations of loving and living emerge.

I am realistic now about George. He is dying, but he is also still living. And in that living, we get to bask in the glory of his life. He does have the easier task. We can’t really mourn for him until he’s gone. But when we do, we will hold each other up and find a place inside ourselves to tuck George as we go about the task of living our own lives.

Author Bio: SARAH BAIN works and writes in the Pacific Northwest. She has work forthcoming or previously published in Long Story Short, The Loss Journal, The Philosophical Mother, Imagine Magazine, Moonshinestill and more. She reads fiction for Bellevue Literary Magazine and is a facilitator for the MISS foundation. Contact Sarah at: sarah@bainbooks.com