“Procrastination is the thief of time,” wrote Edward Young, and an Anglo-Saxon proverb predicts a solitary deathbed for the one who fails to grab life’s chances.

How is this relevant to chemo? Doing chemo buys time. You pay in present suffering for the chance at more life. Right?

But undergoing chemo is not like working out in order to get fit, or spending a grueling weekend collecting documents so you can get your taxes done on time. It can seem a lot more like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Because Ed was doing chemo—and in spite of the fact that it was never envisioned as a curative regimen—we could not start hospice care. On a deeper level, because we were doing chemo, we postponed discussing death and its implications at all: not simply because we couldn’t have hospice care yet, but because as long as Ed was being aggressively treated, there was a sort of pact that it was not yet time to confront the imminence of his death.

But the monsters don’t stop coming nearer because you shut your eyes.

Chemotherapy is meant to postpone death. But instead it can postpone preparing to die. If death ambushes you while you are trying to forestall it, then it might be said you’ve failed in the attempt to lay claim to your life—not because you are going to die after all, though that’s true, but because you never have the chance to lay claim to your own death.

This is a real loss. To lose the chance to think about mortality. To miss the last flight home, not just because chemo makes it hard to travel, but because chemo lets you pretend you’ll catch another flight later. To wait until it’s too late, as some people do, to say “goodbye” or “I love you” or “I’m sorry.” To never complete the practical tasks and unfinished business (does anyone else know where your passwords are?) that you have been putting off until After Chemo.

My husband didn’t have a “bucket list” of events and exploits to accomplish; he just wanted more of his useful, quiet, family-oriented life. Chemo encouraged him to think he might have it back for at least a little while. Focusing our gaze on that distant mirage, we walked through the last weeks of his life without recognizing them.