Love does not come as expected in a cancer hospital. I had seen this a few years earlier, sharing a room with a woman who was dying. She looked like what I had once thought cancer looked like: emaciated, skin and bones. Her husband was with her. In the middle of the night the woman moved her bowels. The sharp stink of it pervaded the room. Her husband stayed by her side and murmured comforting things and emptied the bedpan, and I, staying overnight for a minor procedure, thought that this is what real love was and how different it is from what you think love is when you are 22 and what you see in the magazines: the romantic dates, the sexy lingerie, the beautiful young woman, the rich, handsome man helping her out of the expensive car. Love was emptying the bedpan. Love was sleeping in a chair.

Food does not interest me during the bad Thanksgiving, which is good because I cannot eat. I suck on ice cubes and sometimes there is a broth and eventually I work up to Jello. Herb is indifferent to holidays though not to food, but Thanksgiving that year does not interest him either. Thanksgiving evaporates. I seem to remember sending him to the cafeteria Thanksgiving Day and talking about a very bad hamburger, but I am on morphine, I am stoned, so who knows. And when I am not stoned, I think about death. It has a presence as strong as Herb’s, it’s sitting in its own chair, it’s talking to me.

“You dodged me once, kiddo, but I’m back. Refuse to think about me? Yeah, right. How’s that working out?”

When I come home after Thanksgiving there is food. My friends Sybil and Martin send a cooked chicken and mashed potatoes from the Jefferson Market, because they know I do not cook; my college roommate Christie sends a pound of chocolate with a note, “Eat it all”; my friend Carol drops off her spectacular meatloaf through a year of chemotherapy, just leaving it at the door, because she knows what’s going on. When I have chemo every three weeks Herb comes to my house and sleeps on a blow-up bed and when he has to go out of town my friend Cheryl comes down to New York from Boston and fills in.

I try to avoid the stats, but there comes a time I have to decide between protocols, so I go to Sybil’s to do research because her computer is faster. These are the early days of the web, the mid-90s; research is harder. The survival rate we measure everything against is five years, though sometimes the reports deal with two. The numbers are bad: 25 percent of patients lived two years on this trial; 20 percent lasted five years on that one.