bad news

my godfather has cancer. he called me up this evening to confirm i could come and visit whenever, cos he'd be stuck in Paris for the next 3 months anyway, seen as he'd be going through chemo. he told me this like we were discussing the grocery shopping. and that was pretty much the tone of the whole conversation.

while i was trying to get more information out of him, he kept changing the subject so he told me he'd invited a couple of extra people to my father's 70th birthday in September and other stuff like that. finally, i managed to coax more details out of him. liver and lung cancer, with tumours in the brain. metastatic. just great. he didn't know what stage the cancer was at (stage 1 or terminal??) nor how strong the chemo sessions would be or even when, other than the first one was on Thursday. but it'd be lovely to see me and i was welcome at any time. he finally agreed to find out about the dates of all the chemo sessions so i could at least time it right, once we'd know how he was dealing with it. i know my mother was out for a good week to ten days after chemo, but he was saying one of his friends was fine for 3 days and then out for a week. but the whole conversation reminded me of my conversation with my great-aunt, when she was telling me she wanted to die. like there was nothing wrong and i was acting weird.