The mind doctor

I'm seeing a psychiatrist. I'm not doing it to probe my inner psyche and explore why I've never managed to have a successful relationship, or how I feel about my dead parents and living brothers, or to talk about symbolism in my dreams. I'm doing it because I want short term advice on how to cope with my pending demise from the sarcoma that has spread to my lungs and has an over seventy percent chance of killing me in the next year. I'm also doing it for the drugs, which in this case means Lorazepam, an anti-anxiety medication. (The pills are minuscule. If squirrels carried cash, Lorazepam would be the size of their dimes. When I take them, I'm not sure whether or not they went down or are lost between my cheek and gum.)

My hands are pretty big but still, Lorazepam pills are tiny.

I've seen the psychiatrist twice now. He seems like a good guy. He reminds me, in looks and a little bit in manner, of the actor Charles Grodin. 
Like all people in that field, he's good at helping me re-frame things, seeing them in a better light that's ideally a more realistic one than the negative spin I naturally tend to give things.
His office is in a small brick complex near one of the oldest suburban shopping malls in America. It's an upscale part of town. I went to a farmers market for a late lunch before and had a very good falafel sandwich. (An American farmers market where you can get a falafel sandwich? I'm all for it.)
After the sandwich, I went to a Starbucks for a cup of coffee. Today is Martin Luther King Day so the kids were out of school. Most of the teenagers I saw were girls. Where were the boys? Home playing video games? At movie theaters? I have no idea. The girls were fun to watch as they learn to move about in the world of adults, buying cups of coffee and shopping, choosing where to sit with friends, talking, building friendships. When I was a boy that age I and other boys with a day off thought mostly about blowing things up with firecrackers and getting away with it, or finding a place to smoke purloined cigarettes and get away with it. 
Anyway. I'm seeing a psychiatrist. Most in my condition would have a spouse who would help them cope. Not me, though.

Drugs

I am on drugs. Legal ones, prescribed by a psychiatrist. The one I'm taking is called Lorazepam, an anti-anxiety drug.
In the late 1960s, when I was eleven years old and spending summers in Westport, Massachusetts, we stayed in what had been a farmhouse and rode horses that lived in a barn on the property. A man named Frank Gilbuena was a telephone lineman who also worked as a farrier in his spare time and was often there, shoeing the horses. He was small, wiry, and tough. He wore denim and a cowboy hat. 
Frank never drank.
"If a man's got to drink to live with his environment, there must be something wrong with his environment," he'd say. "Drinking won't change that. He's got to change it."
I did the things most teenagers of that era did when it came to drinking. I never tried hard drugs, but I smoked marijuana now and then. I drank. A friend and I would get an empty jar and take half an inch from each of the many and varied bottles of alcohol my parents had, sneak off and drink it. I drank gallons of 3.2 beer in the late 1970s at my Ohio college's parties. After college, out in the world, I thought it was manly to drink Scotch, so I did and I even grew to like the taste. I never learned about wine but I drank it. I never used hard drugs.

I'm glad I'm human but when I see the raw bliss of animals sometimes I'd trade places with joy.

At no time in the 1980s or after did I try cocaine, which was so prevalent at the time it was said that hundreds of pounds clung to U.S. bills in circulation. 
At my core, I always agreed with Frank and others like him. Don't use crutches if you can avoid them. Play out the hand you've been dealt, no cheating. Adversity will give you strength. A life lived with honor and some pain is better than one of numbed deceit.
But now? Bring on the (legal) drugs.
And why not? The Lorazepam has kept feelings of panic at bay. I'm sleeping through the night and eating again, and I've only been taking it for four days. If I take nothing and let fear course through my veins, will that make me a better person? Will it make my death more meaningful to me or to anyone else? Lorazepam can be addictive, but when the odds say I've got around a year, does that matter, if I'm not stealing and lying or hurting others in any way to get it?
Without something to help I'd be more inclined to drag my friends and family more deeply into my woes. (I know me; I am shallow and weak and even though I know sharing my pain does nothing to lessen it, I'd be bound to share it anyway.) You could say that this drug will help others in addition to me.
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Tonight was to be the night I was going to tell my brothers about my condition and prognosis. I put it off. Tomorrow, perhaps. Maybe it's the drug, but I can cope without their help at the moment, so why would I not do that for as long as possible?