I’ll soon be 70. Just three short months to go. A miracle, since I was supposed to die when I was 59.

“There’s nothing more I can do for you,” Dr. Kaplan said then, not looking at me as he turned to walk out the examining room door.

“They’re just small spots. Why can’t you remove them?”

“Because they’ll just come back,” he said, looking over his shoulder.

“Are you telling me I’m dying?”

“You might have double-digits of months left,” he said as he walked out the door. “We’ll do biopsies to be sure.”

My wife and I sat silently, frozen, unable to look at each other. We’d been through the original diagnosis of tongue cancer a year earlier, through three grueling tongue and neck surgeries, weeks of radiation.

And now it had come to this.

I felt boiling hot, like I wasn’t in my body, but floating above it. I finally looked at Tanya, sitting on a small chair by my elevated examination chair. Her short blond hair was tousled from running her hands through it. Her face was red, a sign of her intense emotion. Her eyes were glazed.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I hated all that I was putting her through.

After more than an hour, three lab techs nervously came into the room and took pinprick biopsies of the small white dots on my neck. Then, Dr. Kaplan returned and scooped out a big chunk of flesh, as if to prove his point.

“The preliminary check of the biopsies is negative for cancer,” a tech reported an hour later. “We’ll have the final report in a few days. You can go home now.”

Why did they tell me I was dying when they didn’t know for sure?

But Dr. Kaplan was right, after all. A week later, his assistant telephoned me to say that the final results were positive for cancer. He referred me to an oncologist for palliative care. Palliative care, meaning comfort while dying.

“What do you know about your condition?” Dr. Colevas, the oncologist, asked. A short, tidy man, he wore a red bow tie and had a gentle look that invited conversation.

“I’m terminal,” I said.

“I hate it when they say that,” he said. “They don’t know.”

But he admitted my odds were very slim.

Unlike another oncologist I’d seen, who had suggested a rigorous bombing of chemo that would have put me near death, Dr. Colevas thought I should wait.

“You’re not in bad shape,” he said. “Why not enjoy life now and save chemo for later?”

So, there I was—with Tanya, my wife of 29 years (although we’d only become “legal” the year before), with Cooper, our just-launching, 22-year-old son who had recently graduated from college, and our old black poodle Mollie. We had a cozy house in Berkeley, a gratifying life, and a thriving mediation practice.

The decision to close my business was easy.

The hard part was walking the tightrope between simultaneously preparing to die and maintaining hope. But Tanya and I were people who planned a wedding and prepared for cancer surgery at the same time. We could do this, I thought. It would be tricky, but possible.

We took care of the business part of dying quickly: checking our estate plans and doing a budget to be sure Tanya would be okay without me. Then, I went about the business of living and trying to heal. Since the original diagnosis, I’d piled on every kind of alternative treatment that resonated: acupuncture, herbs, supplements, homeopathy, massage, spiritual work. Now I went to two healers: a woman from Nepal named Aama Bombo, one of the Thirteen Grandmothers, a group of female shamans from all over the world. She told me to pray to White Tara, the goddess of compassion; to eat grains of rice that she blessed; to meditate twice a day. And I did it all, with great discipline. Later, I went to a healer from Iran that I called Healing Man. He laid hands on me, prayed, and told me not to talk about the cancer, which turned out to be the best advice I got.

“Talking about it just gives it energy,” he said. “It makes your life revolve around cancer. You don’t need to take in everyone else’s anxiety about it. Just live.”

Yet the time came when Dr. Colevas said I should probably consider chemo. Several tumors in my neck were growing larger. It was horrifying to see them––ugly, oozing red lumps––every time I looked in the mirror.

Just decline treatment and die in peace, I thought at first. Why do chemo when you’re going to die anyway? It seemed nuts.

But eventually, without getting pressure from anyone, even Tanya, I decided to do it. I wanted to try everything.

I lost 60 pounds. My clothes hung on me; my skin sagged like I was aged. But for the first time in my life, I could eat anything I wanted without worry. Tablespoons of peanut butter! Avocados! Ice cream!

I stopped trying to learn technology. Why bother?

I stopped all routine health maintenance. Why fix teeth or endure a colonoscopy?

Instead, I hung out with my family, my friends, my neighbors. I wrote a memoir. I relaxed. I read. I closed my business. I slept. I looked at flowers, at the giant redwood behind our house, at the clouds skittering across the sky. I savored life in all its forms, especially my own.

“If you were in the hospital,” Dr. Colevas said after a few weeks of chemo, “I’d bring my students in to show them what a tumor looks like when it’s dying from the inside out.” My tumors slowly shrank.

After three months of weekly chemo, six hours every Friday, not including the commute, and a long wait of three more months, I got a PET scan that showed no cancer for the first time in almost two years! Although he was pleased, Dr. Colevas warned that he fully expected the cancer to return.

“Go out and enjoy yourself –– for now,” he ordered, writing a prescription: “Take a bubble bath.”

He knew I hadn’t been able to do that for months due to the chemo equipment in my arm. It got pulled out with a whoosh that very day.

Despite his prediction that it wasn’t over, I decided I’d gotten a miracle.

Many more months later, after multiple monthly check-ins, Dr. Colevas finally agreed.

“There’s still no cancer here. I guess you better keep doing what you’ve been doing, because I don’t know what worked. If you’ve been standing on your head every day, you better keep doing it. And now you have to take care of your long-term health.”

“How often does this happen?” I asked.

“Almost never. You had a less than one percent chance of surviving.”

Tanya and I drove home that day in a state of bliss, from Stanford Cancer Center through Palo Alto, across the Dumbarton Bridge, floating just above the surreal water of the Bay, and up Highway 880 to Berkeley in rush hour traffic. Every once in a while, one of us would say, as if it were a revelation, “Less than one percent!”

Now it’s for my annual appointment with Dr. Colevas. Our visits went from once a week to once a month to once every three months to once every six months. At this point, we meet once a year. This will be our sixth annual visit. Dr. Colevas will wear his signature bowtie; he’ll poke and prod, find nothing, and then we’ll talk about the books we liked in the last year. I’ll recommend Pachinko and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which he’ll enter into the Notes section of his iPhone. He’ll recommend something that might be too heady for me, but I’ll write it down, just in case. Then we’ll agree to meet again next year.

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