Year one of retirement

My retirement began with my best friend's cancer diagnosis.  I was driving on the Atlanta freeway when she called to tell me that she had stage four cancer.  It was a Sunday, and I was driving to North Carolina to meet friends for a week in the mountains. I had retired the previous Friday, and was ready for a some down time.  She had been shuffling from doctor to doctor in order to ascertain the nature of the  lump she had discovered several months earlier. I was stunned by her news, and was navigating  an unfamiliar freeway, so our conversation was brief.
 A blur of doctor appointments, treatment, hospitalizations, hope, and denial swirled past me for the next seven months.  She continued to teach art, and I took two of her classes.  Her students had become her friends, so she received energy from teaching.  Chemotherapy was  started, which made her so sick that she was hospitalized. Different chemotherapy was begun.  She lost her hair and experimented with wigs and hats. She was too tired to care for her dog, so a friend took him temporarily.  She gave me her house plants.  She made funeral arrangements with our priest and wrote her obituary.  She started giving friends pieces of her art and jewelry.  She donated her body to the local university where she had once taught.  She took care of all of the end-of-life details so that her sons wouldn't have to do it after she died. She did all this while hanging on to the hope that this cancer might be reduced to a manageable condition. This started to seem possible.
 She joined my family for Thanksgiving Dinner and we enjoyed sitting on the front porch chatting in the mild November weather.  She organized a Christmas potluck at the Art Center where she taught.  We went to church  together on Christmas Eve, and several people mentioned how beautiful she looked. She and her son spent Christmas day together, and she made the meal she most wanted-tuna casserole.  She enjoyed the company of her three cats.          
 She decided she needed a land line in case she needed to call for help and her cell phone was out of power.  We made an awful trip to the cell phone store, where she was hardly able to walk from the car to the store and had to sit down as soon as we made it through the door.  The salesman was not patient with her difficulty expressing her thoughts, but we finally got what we came for.  She went in for scans, then we had a conference with her doctor. Her son, and six or seven friends gathered in a tiny room designed for four people at most.  Her difficulty walking was a symptom of the cancer which had metastasized to her brain and bones. It was also present in her lungs. She was admitted to a hospital room at once to begin a 12 day course of radiation of her brain.  She seemed eager to get this treatment.