Nobody talks about dying. Not really. People skirt around it, soften it, change the subject. I understand why — it's uncomfortable, it's frightening, and most of us have built our lives around the assumption that it's a long way off.
I don't have that luxury. So I'm going to talk about it.
Not because I'm morbid. Not because I've given up. But because being forced to look at death clearly — to sit with it, to examine it, to make your peace with it — has given me the best year and a half of my life. And I think that's worth sharing.
The moment I found out
The day after my surgery, my consultant came to see me. He told me the cancer had invaded nearby structures. It wasn't good news. And the thought of dying — really dying, not as an abstract concept but as a specific, personal, incoming reality — moved immediately to the front of my mind.
And do you know what? I was OK.
He actually said to me: "You've taken that news well." Because I was calm. Completely calm. My response was simple: "There's nothing I can do about it." He agreed. Shrugged his shoulders as if to say — good point.
As it turned out, there were things I could do. I've written about all of them elsewhere on this site. But in that moment, faced with the reality of my own mortality, I was calm. Stoic. Not performing — genuinely calm. I never once thought "why me." It could be anyone. I'd always known that. And somehow, I was OK with it.
The only thing that broke me
The only time I have felt genuinely upset — properly, deeply upset — is when I think about Catherine and the girls. Not about leaving life. About leaving them.
We had built something. A team. And the thought of that team losing a member — not just any member, but the one who steered the ship, the one who handled the finances, the one who knew where everything was — that hit me harder than anything about my own mortality ever did.
I wasn't scared for me. I was sad for them. There's a difference — and it took me a while to understand that Catherine needed me to understand it.
I went immediately practical. Bank accounts, utilities, everything in my name — I started making it simpler, making it manageable, making sure that if the worst happened Catherine wouldn't be left trying to untangle a life she hadn't been managing. I was the organised one when it came to house affairs. She had no idea what was in the bank accounts because we were a team, and that was my part of the team. I needed to change that.
Catherine didn't want to talk about it. Understandably. And I was probably too practical at times, too focused on the logistics without fully considering what she was going through emotionally. She said something to me recently that stopped me completely: "How would you feel if you lost me?" In that moment I understood. I'd been so focused on making things easier for her practically that I hadn't always been there for the emotional side of it. It's a work in progress. We're a team. Teams adapt.
The strange thing nobody expects — relief
Here's something I haven't seen anyone write about honestly. Alongside the sadness for my family, alongside the practicalities, there was something else. Something I didn't expect at all.
Relief.
My whole life I had judged myself against other people's expectations. Society's expectations. The idea that you should have a career, stay in a job, build something, accumulate things. I never fitted that mould. I'd always get bored after six months and quit. I'd start businesses that felt right and then want to pivot when they didn't. I tried to conform and found it almost impossible. That tension — between who I was and who I felt I was supposed to be — sat with me for years. It wasn't great for my mental health.
And then the diagnosis came. And all of that just — lifted.
Nobody expected anything of me anymore. And I stopped expecting anything of myself — except to stay alive for as long as possible. The weight I'd been carrying my whole adult life was just gone. I didn't realise how heavy it was until it wasn't there.
I had lived a varied life. I had put happiness and family above material things and always found a way to make it work. We had a roof over our heads, food on the table, and we were having a good time. I never had much money but I always had enough. And when I looked back at that life honestly — I had no regrets. Not one.
For someone facing the end of their life, that turned out to be the most important thing of all.
The bus argument — and why it's not the same
People say it to me a lot. "Anyone could get run over by a bus tomorrow." They mean well. They're trying to normalise it, trying to close the gap between my situation and theirs so they don't have to sit with the discomfort of it.
But it's not the same. And here's why.
Nobody lives their life outrunning a bus. Nobody walks down the street genuinely believing they might be hit by a bus today. Death as an abstract possibility — something that could happen to anyone at any time — is not the same as death as a known, named, specific outcome. Having a terminal diagnosis reframes everything. It's not "you might die someday." It's "we know how this ends, and we know roughly when."
That knowledge is not a curse. It turns out it's the clearest lens I've ever looked at my own life through. I know what matters. I know what doesn't. I have never been more certain of either.
The best year and a half of my life
Since my diagnosis we have lived more fully than we did in the years before it. More countries visited. More yes and less no. More time with the people who matter and less time worrying about people and things that don't. More sunrises, more bike rides, more meals around the table that actually mean something.
I don't say yes to things I shouldn't anymore. I don't do things I don't want to do. I don't sweat the small stuff — and I mean that in the fullest possible sense, not as a platitude but as a daily, active choice. Because I know what the small stuff is now. And I know what isn't.
I may have a terminal diagnosis. But I have also found, inside that diagnosis, something that most people spend their whole lives searching for — a clear, unambiguous understanding of what actually matters.
That's not nothing. That's everything.
— Nick