I couldn't even remember the punchline

As I said to the artist on the phone as I was walking past the garlic, cannellini beans, pinoli, focaccia, biscotti, and pancetta for sale in the innards of the mainline station, my sister wants so badly to stay alive but knows she is dying and the two facts simply are not compatible. My sister looked like she'd done fifteen rounds too many with the cancer. The mind looked like it wanted to ditch the body. The lights looked like they were going out, though a kind of obstinacy remained, a glimpse of something sturdier than it should be. This is not me being morbid - I have never felt so life-affirmative - but this is how it is for my sister. She shook her head one time when I was with her and stared at the floor. It was as if it was the unfeeling doctor saying to her she had only weeks to live that had done it in the end. With the cancer she was almost fine, or at least she knew it and somehow managed it, certainly keeping it down with the regular doses of chemotherapy she hated so much. But the stark and unsentimental timeframe she was so suddenly presented with, the fact it was put so bluntly, I think surprised her to a degree that it was as if she'd always given doctors the benefit of some kind of mortal doubt when it came to manners, but now, as she sat dazed in the corner of her living room, punch-drunk and against the ropes, I don't think she was sure about anything, except that manners perhaps were more important than death. With great effort she raised her head again and looked at me. Was I the referee come to call the whole thing off? A long-lost component of a divided self? Or an irritant, a fly on the windscreen, as she struggled to enjoy the view? The daffodils bobbed in the wind as we spoke. The carved wooden elephants and sailing ships all looked so terribly familiar. The mantelpiece was crammed almost boastfully with cards. But they were both hurting, my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law said to me later that he wouldn't see much point in surviving my sister. I reminded him he had a son. Just before I left - my sister was tired - I stared deep into her indigo blue eyes. I lost her briefly but then she returned again as if slowly getting some joke I had told but had long since forgotten. (I couldn't even remember the punchline.) Anyway, the artist listened sympathetically as I told her briefly what I could on the phone about my sister and then I elected not to buy any of the prosciutto and caught the train home.