Willemot

Saturday 26 May, noon

How blessed are we to have such a great GP for a doctor. Isabelle Willemot comes up at 11:00AM, having parked her bicycle outside. She finds Lara's lungs better but her overall energy level lower. Reading is no longer an option; playing scrabble even less.

It is striking how easy we find it to talk with her about where Lara finds herself on her way to the end of her life.

Lara doesn't wish to die; it is not the end or destiny she has chosen for herself, at least not now. She never wanted to die at an age younger than her father was when he himself died 'much too young'. She has always had in mind to die at a ripe old age, a lady who has lived enough and is ready to depart. She wanted to come to that age together with me, envisaging a life full of adventure - with me.

"I can't believe I am discussing my own death", she says, adding that it feels like we are talking about somebody else's. "This is all so scary". It is the fact that you see yourself retracting from what you have been, she notes. It is worse than a nightmare, for from a nightmare you always wake up sooner or later. With death there is no second chance. You die, you really die.

I wish I would be more zen, more at peace. "I have no belief system in place". She wishes she were more sure in her conviction that she is making the right decision, and that it will be OK whatever she decides (like people recovering from a near-death experience; people who didn't want to come back). And when the end is near, it must be dignified and effortless. Yet, fading away is just as scary as an abrupt passing. She procrastinates, doesn't want to be rash or firm for the moment, feeling rightly she doesn't need to be. She feels constrained by the push and pull surrounding a choice of destiny. "I don't have to make a choice if I don't want to", she says, and wonders if, in the end, it makes any difference at all.

There are several switch moments on her final parcours that will help her make a decision. One is eating. The less she takes in, the more feeble she gets, the more sleepy she will become, and ultimately she won't have energy to wake up. She has no appetite, nor does she feel the urge to generate one artificially. Then there is Tuesday. She is scheduled to go to the hospital for transfusions. But will she actually go? Or will she want to go one last time?

We can talk about it together only for so long, a little bit at the time. This is too enormous to want to settle the matter in one fell swoop. Her brow draws into a sob and she wipes tears from her face. Pressure builds up behind my own eyes. Willemot is flushed as well.