Halloween 2017 (in Mexico)

It isn’t even as though I didn’t know I was being loved my whole adult life. Geoff shows his love through actions. (By making me coffee every morning. By packing the dishwasher. Loading up the washing machine. Yes, we both have dirty washing and so on, but these were always traditionally my tasks and now he does them too. To me, it is part of him showing he loves and cares for me.) It’s that it suddenly comes home to one when you’re away and you see two people sitting quietly, her head on his shoulder and you begin to understand what it is going to be like once he is gone. No one to comfortably rest your shoulder on.
And it’s feeling like the height of callousness and carelessness to be away now … now that he is beginning to have to face his own mortality.
He sees the oncologist today at nine. He's had the operation, a new one, to remove his salivary glands and now we need to know if it was successful and if he needs radiation. And what the prognosis is.
And that's why I'm awake here in Mexico while he is in Cape Town.  I don’t think it’s easy
for anyone and I’ve not been able to have the conversation with him yet. I don’t
know how to begin it. Yet I know it's better to say something than be quiet. What I don't want to do is be insensitive, be pushy, be callous. But I have the spectre of Cynthia's way of dealing, of being quiet and expecting the other person to understand, and I know that doesn't work and it is not what one should do. You have to, however difficult, and insensitive, and callous, it might sound say something rather than not. Even cruel. Remember the  "HAD SHE (Cynthia) BUT TOLD ME is the part that happens, over and over and over again. From her side, she has always said it is obvious when something is impolite, or cruel, or insensitive. From my side it is not obvious. I need to be told.
Take Bettina for example: what a blessing that she can explode immediately I say something insensitive. I understand, apologise, sometimes crawl even and soon it’s all over. But the silent treatment which is not even just silent - just smoothing over into something else, is much much worse." (Quoting from my blog Sib - the broken relationship between my sister and me)  Unfortunately I do carry on, serenely unaware.
And another thing, things that seem self-explanatory to the general population (eg: "It's obvious that the President of the United States' life is worth more than a random five-year-old's" - well, to me TOTALLY unobvious. In fact the child is far more precious. The US pres has had at least 50 or in Trump's case 70 misbegotten years, why on earth would he be more valuable than the little boy lost in Capricorn? Why?)
But I digress (hugely). I came here to write about what is happening to Geoff and me. You see here again my incomprehension (as was Sheil’s: mine is hysterically less so) about the awfulness of death if you are suffering from something incurable is a gross factor. I can choose for myself: I am fairly decided to commit a hopefully assisted suicide as soon as I judge my grandchildren don’t need me around any more. (My judgment not their’s, by the way!) But my husband may have vastly different views and I am not to impinge upon them. Whatever he decides goes. And I will not make a spectacle of my sadness at losing him so that
he has to comfort me instead of thinking of himself.