EDITOR’S NOTE: Judy Bachrach writes for Vanity Fair, and is the creator of thecheckoutline.org, an online advice column for friends and relatives of the terminally ill.

————————

“Dear Judy, my husband was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer and has around five years to live,” begins the plaintive letter I recently received on my website.

“The brakes have been put on for us buying a nice big, more expensive house and selling the smaller one. I’m just a bit frustrated at not moving forward with moving to a large house even though I know he is not feeling good. Any advice for me?”     

Here’s what the “frustrated” letter-writer really means: How can she move to a bigger, plusher, grander place (and feel great about doing so) while her husband is getting radiation?

It’s this sort of writer who is making me rethink my mission. Almost six months ago I thought it might be a nice (and novel!) idea to start thecheckoutline.org, an online advice column for friends and relatives of the terminally ill. After all, people who are dying are generally weak, tired, fearful and confused – afflictions shared by everyone who is close to them.

In other words, neither the dying nor their relatives are in any position to seek good honest counsel. Doctors, embarrassed by what they perceive as their own failure to foil death at every turn, are often of little use. Hospitals no longer want the terminally ill to spend their last weeks under their roof: bad for their stats, it’s generally believed.

So – I figured – that’s where I come in. I can write a column providing what nobody else provides: help and comfort for people who can’t get it anywhere else.

Now I believe I should also probably write a sideline companion to the daily online column. It would be a book, entitled How to Attract as Many Insane People as Possible to Your Website, Without Really Trying.

Very possibly now you’re thinking: Just who’s this Judy calling crazy when everyone told her from the outset (correctly, as things transpired) that such a venture will never make a nickel? For some reason advertisers like — oh, Dior, Jimmy Choo and even Marlboro Lights, which you might think would have a natural affinity for the subject — aren’t as yet totally attracted to a site devoted to dying or even death.

You’re also possibly thinking, what exactly qualifies me, the person who throughout her 20s and 30s fainted impressively at the sight of a hypodermic, to give advice on the problems arising from a terminal diagnosis?

The answer is amazingly simple. I’ve spent years volunteering in hospices, and giving advice to people who really need it is the one thing hospices never allow volunteers to do. Man the phones? I never have managed to master a single hospice call transfer, including the really important ones from pharmacists dispensing narcotics and clergymen dispensing heaven, and boy do they trust me with all that. But tell a dying man’s mistress to avoid his wife in the waiting room? Absolutely not.

Now of course I know why the hospice staffers were so skittish. About a quarter of the e-mails I receive are relatively easy, falling under the category of: “My-sister-in-law-was-a-complete-slut-do-I-have-to-drop-by-her-deathbed-and-say-hi?” Another quarter of the e-mails are such heartbreakers I can hardly bear to repeat their substance: a teenager who knows he doesn’t have long to live, and wants his mother to acknowledge his condition; a breast-cancer patient who can’t continue paying the mortgage. Still, even these I can deal with. Or (as in the case of the woman with the mortgage problem) find a legal expert to advise the writer.

But the enraging ones – those that make me despair — come from people like that first correspondent with the dying husband who proves so resistant to moving vans and plush new houses. I’ve had others like it: Parents write in complaining that teachers with cancer should be fired for making their kids depressed. And teachers writing in to vent about a kid with cancer who makes them depressed.

So yes, for the last half year I’ve been wondering why dying, of all activities, brings out the beast in some. But another part of me, the more sanguine and hopeful part, also wonders: How, in the face of the sad inevitable, do the rest of us manage to stay so damn sane? So compassionate and understanding?

Why do we, in other words, continue to continue?