In November 2025, I learned that my kidneys weren’t functioning properly and this truly accidental discovery led me and my primary care provider on a relatively short investigation that was finally diagnosed as UTUC or upper tract urothelial carcinoma, a rare and incurable cancer of the urinary tract.
Since that time, and this was diagnosed around March of 2026, I have undergone major surgery to remove a non-functioning left kidney and a left ureter that was completely blocked by a tumor the size of a golf ball. I also underwent a TURBT procedure (transurethral resection of bladder tumor (TURBT) is a procedure healthcare providers use to diagnose and treat bladder cancer) at the same time. The ureter has a diameter of about 3mm so this tumor was by comparison enormous but as of April 9 and its removal it had not broken through and the margins were intact and good.
My recovery was quite swift and uneventful and within a few weeks I was back out walking each morning that the weather permitted it, doing 4–5 miles of Vermont’s uphill and downhill walking in just a little over an hour for 4 miles. I hope you understand that I am 73 going on 74 in November and I have a cancer that has metastasized to a lymph node, yet I still walk at a rate of just a tiny bit less than 4mph! Many 30 year olds can’t do that!
I have remained quite happy and active despite my diagnosis, even after metastatic cancer (a single lymph node) was confirmed by PET scan and by a subsequent biopsy in May. I continue to make art and I speak French for an hour nearly every day with friends, both local and abroad. Also since March 2022, I have been speaking with and emotionally supporting a woman in Ukraine who has been displaced from her home in the Russian-occupied east several times to where she now lives in a shelter dormitory in western Ukraine. This last has given my life additional meaning and purpose, as I know how much she depends on our near daily conversations.
You might ask me how I can be happy now with such an illness and an uncertain prognosis but my response is this: How can I not? I could dwell on how “unfair” it is to have this potentially life-shortening disease when I spent so much of my adult life miserable, fighting mental illness. I could worry about how I will cope in the future knowing death could be on the horizon. But neither railing against “unfairness” nor worrying about an as yet unknown and unrealized future seem to me either productive or a useful way to spend my time.
It truly is, as is said too often without a deeper understanding, what it is. I will reiterate this: it is what it is. Accepting reality without protest truly is key. Once you accept things in life as they are, especially things you have no power to control or change, life becomes immeasurably easier. What is real is now, and this “now” includes cancer yes but it also includes my walk most mornings and my art and French and my many friends and my wish to support and speak with my friend in Ukraine for as long as I can. This pushes me onward and gives my life meaning and purpose. I was miserable much of my adult life, but I’m happy now. What a blessing that is! Far better to have my life approaching its ending when I am happy rather than ending when miserable . Some have had a happy past, but become misery-beset when age brings on debilitating or chronic conditions. I used to be misery-laden but no longer. And to me this is precious: that the end of my life, whenever that is, might come at a peak of happiness rather in the “slough of despond” and in misery.
i remain immensely grateful for these past ten years and for any future that still remains to me. As for the past? It remains only in imagination now, just like the future. I refuse to dwell on either but to live my life in the present, and in reality. I love life but I accept as well the fact that it must end some day. This brings both peace and happiness, and not just happiness but joy: acceptance of what is. That’s the key. That and an unconditional acceptance of other human beings.
i will end this with the same words that are added to each email I send: “To love the whole world, to welcome the most odious and hate-filled with open heart, to accept and cherish each being completely, human or non-human alike, and to love without reservation or condition, this is our task, and the only risk worth taking.”
