If you have not read part one, no worries. It was long ago and far away. There is no longer a flood outside my door but the leaks persist, now inside rather than outside.

I am a privileged, old white woman who is not without a bucket and an extra large, Halloween-orange bowl for when the drips fan out. Our building boiler is many decades old like the people it serves (and the plumbers it baffles).

A steady drip of life, water, and in these last two-and-a-half years, I have known oceans. More of the mind, yes, but also an actual glimpse of the ebb and flow of life and how it might end or not.

Cancer takes you there.

Mine was endometrial, grade one, stage one B. Early, early stages, quite common for a 73-year-old woman; the protocol is radical hysterectomy, which I had. I was in the hospital less than 24 hours. The pathology report revealed four remaining cells had invaded my lymphatic/vascular system. Three direct radiation treatments later and no more cancer. I continue to have checkups every three months.

That’s how endometrial cancer was for me, not painful but persistent and eventually eradicated. I was going to leave my bout with cancer at that until I heard 49-year-old poet laureate Andrea Gibson read their poem, “Love Letter From the Afterlife.” The reading was to Gibson’s wife, Megan Falley, during the last days of Gibson’s life. Very soon after, Andrea Gibson died of ovarian cancer, stage four.

You may or may not know (I didn’t) that the terms ovarian and endometrial cancer are sometimes used interchangeably. Gibson wasn’t the right grade/stage for even a fair prognosis much less a good one. You either are or not, with cancer. It’s not much of a spectrum.

“Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while those are still alive.”

(Andrea Gibson, “Love Letter from the Afterlife”)

I have been waiting for that sentence all my life. Not that I knew it, of course. That kind of clarity just arrives, and the world changes. The life force that infuses this dimension is a 49-year-old poet writing a love letter to the world as they fade from life.

I have not the clarity of a poet or the bursting, immense love of Andrea Gibson but in this past year I came close to slipping the veil.

Six weeks later after my radical hysterectomy and before the radiation treatments, I almost died of urosepsis, a blood infection. I ran fevers as high as 103 and my heart raced to keep pace with a kind of Russian roulette playing out in the hunt for just the right antibodies, as my kidneys began to shut down.

I have never known such presence as machines beeped, doors opened and closed, food plates came and left undisturbed. I was immersed in life without clinging to it, as aware of pain as of joy, afloat in an ocean of love, as wave after wave of clarity buoyed me in timelessness.

I was so grateful for having had a chance to live—nothing seemed more precious—until the depth of my meditative state lightened with the swarm of antibodies and reality broke through, bright and cold on the afternoon of the fourth day. After a discussion with the hospitalist, I went home.

During those three and a half days I sensed I would live. It wasn’t a given; it was more like no time left to lose. To use Pema Chodron’s term, stop practicing “idiot” compassion, no more tilting at windmills, build boundaries firm. Meet people as they are and be compassionate but know that sometimes walking away or saying no is the kindest thing that can be done.

I did not feel easy days were ahead nor have they been but in my ocean travels, I sailed true North.