My goodbye letter to those I love as cancer slowly kills me

Seizure. Stroke. Cancer. In that order.

“I knew that before I died two things would happen to me. That number one: I would regret my entire life, and number two: I would want to live my life over again.”

That bloody quote has been hanging over me like a dark cloud ever since I purchased the 10th anniversary edition of The Holy Bible in Woolworths, Aberdare, like an inevitable self-fulfilling prophecy. Now it’s finally manifested for me and I’m utterly distraught at how it’s all been leading to this.

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Today I received the news I’d been told to expect: terminal stage four brain cancer (glioblastoma). I’ve had the tumour removed, and with radiotherapy and treatment, the average life expectancy is around 12 to 18 months. There are anomalies, but I’ve been pretty average in everything my entire life. I suppose now is as good a time as any for me to step it up.

Turns out the old tumour has probably been sitting there dormant for years, pressing down on the part of my brain where all my personality, emotion and memory is stored. It has been silently orchestrating and consuming me in the background, warping and changing my outlook on life, making me question everything good I had.

Most of my adult life I’ve suffered with depression and a crippling anxiety that until now I’d put down to my downtrodden Welshness and my love of the Manics. Now I know it’s also because I’ve had a little neighbour upstairs, pushing my melancholy buttons. My misery wasn’t solely formed of my teenage obsession with Richey Edwards.

I’ve spent years poring over my own