A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I had noticed I make little groaning sounds when performing several activities.  In The New Yorker that came Saturday, there's a cartoon of an older man entering a room and announcing to his wife, "I've decided to start groaning every time I have to move my body a little bit."  Coincidence?  Or just great (old) minds thinking (and groaning) alike?

Cancer, shmancer--that's probably easier to say now that I'm in some sort of holding pattern than it was immediately after the diagnosis (and surgery) and than it will perhaps be later.  Other than the emotional reaction, I was also faced initially with practical decisions, and given the prognosis, they seemed imperatives.  Even now, I can't help counting.  The average prognosis for stage four kidney cancer is 10-11 months, and that seemed especially short since the cancer had metastasized at least six months before I got an accurate diagnosis last April.  Dr. Van, the renal oncologist, didn't bring a prognosis up, but I thought it would be strange not to ask.  And, of course, by that time, I'm found the same information on all the sites (Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, NIH, kidneycancer.org, etc.--the Net is a mixed blessing) that I'd looked at before it became too discouraging to continue.

Task number one was to bring my will up to date.  My closest relatives are cousins, but because my father was the youngest of seven and I wasn't born till my mother was nearly 40, my cousins were 15 or so years older than I, and I never knew them very well.  I know that there were eight of them, that one died years ago, and that one is still living.  About the other six, I have no idea.  There is one in particular that I could imagine suddenly appearing to make a claim.  She's a creepy born again Christian whom I haven't seen in many years.  She once told me that as a gay atheist, I was doubly damned, but that she sat up nights weeping and praying over me.  (I assume by now she's realized the futility of that and caught up on her sleep.)  She also told me that she never put a cake in the oven without praying that it would turn out.  I can see her now: Tebowing in front of the oven as her red velvet cake bakes.  On the one hand, I wondered which got more fervent prayers: my "soul" or her cake.  More seriously, I thought that if I were a god and "let" thousands of children a day, their bodies often covered with flies, starve, I'd be (al)mightily insulted that she thought we shared the same nutritional priorities.  Our relationship never improved.  (I see that "our" is ambiguous; I meant my cousin's and mine, but it's equally true of her god and me.)  At my mother's funeral, my cousin caused a scene because the funeral director put my partner, rather than her, in the lead car to the cemetery.  Several years later, since I was her only cousin and her parents had died, I wrote suggesting a truce.  She wrote back that, of course she had forgiven me because she was a Christian and that's what Christians do, but she was surprised that as a non-Christian, I even understood forgiveness.  She added a P.S. saying that her mother had lent my mother (they were sisters) a watercolor she had done and would I please return it.  So much for that attempt.  At any rate, the will was duly made current.

I also needed to redo the durable power of attorney and powers of health care decisions.  I didn't (and don't) think it's fair to ask Mohamed to make those kinds of powerfully emotional choices.  I've known my lawyer (both professionally and somewhat socially) for three decades, so I gave him those powers.  He knows me well enough to know what I would want but isn't emotionally invested.

Finally, the lawyer gave me a thick binder in which to keep all these documents.  The last section consisted of pages and pages of questions about funeral and burial/cremation arrangements.  What I'd really like is what, I've discovered, is now called a "green funeral."   My Whitmanesque side likes the notion of returning to the earth: "When I die / Look for me under your boot soles."  I don't see any reason to be embalmed.  It (like cremation) is prohibited for Muslims and for Orthodox Jews, as are fancy coffins.  Shrouds do for Muslims, plain pine boxes for strictly observant Jews.  America is one of the few countries where embalming is routine.  In Europe, for example, you have to be gravely important to be embalmed.  But the idea of Mohamed trying to convince a funeral director to skip embalming and choosing the very plainest and cheapest coffin available seemed like asking a lot.  So I left the burial option unchecked and went for cremation.  I suppose Washburn would frown on my ashes being scattered around Morgan Hall.

So all that is taken care of.  Some of it might be easier if gays could get married.  We've thought about going to Iowa, my home state, where gay marriage is legal, but of course it would have no consequences in Kansas or nationally.  Symbolic gestures are rich, but their resonance doesn't extend to the courts.