Troppo readers may be wondering why I haven’t been blogging lately, after making a comeback several months ago after a long absence. The reason is that my wife Jen is in hospital dying from ovarian cancer. It’s very distressing, both for me and our daughter Jessica (not to mention Jen herself).Jen was first diagnosed with cancer in 2017 and given 6 months to live at that time. Fortunately a great surgeon by the name of Tom Jobling, who Nicholas Gruen recommended, managed to remove nearly all the cancer. After that we kept up treatment in Darwin, with frequent trips to Melbourne. Eventually that became too exhausting, not least because most affordable flights to and from Darwin are “redeye” flights which occur late at night. Effectively you end up with jetlag after each flight.Eventually we decided to move to Melbourne in late 2019 for treatment at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in North Melbourne. I was in some ways quite relieved about that because I was finding Darwin’s wet season heat and humidity almost impossible to bear. It’s like living permanently in a sauna bath.We settled in St Kilda, which both of us really love. Lots of entertainment and great restaurants and cafes, on the waterfront where I can go for long bike rides around the foreshore, and very close to the Melbourne CBD by tram.Moreover, most of Jen’s family live in Melbourne: both her parents and two of her brothers. Jen loves St Kilda too, in fact she lived in St Kilda for several years before moving to Darwin in about 1990, although she misses Darwin more than I do. I like visiting in the dry season, because my daughter and grand-daughter and many friends live there, and it’s a great climate at that time and a beautiful place.The only downside for me is that I had to close my private law practice and stop teaching constitutional and administrative law at Charles Darwin University. In other ways that was a relief. I am almost 72 and have taught for 20 years and run a law practice since 1985 i.e. 40 years. The only thing I really miss is the money.Anyway, Peter Mac is one of the world’s great cancer hospitals, and we owe Jen’s principal oncologist George Au Yeung more than I can describe. He is a caring doctor (not true of all) and can explain complex concepts in ways we could understand.Jen has been on more clinical trials than Peter Mac has ever experienced, but time was always going to run out, and it almost has. She is now in palliative care at Peter Mac, and unlikely to come out. Hopefully she will make it to her 63rd birthday on 19 August, but she certainly won’t make Christmas.At the moment I am in respite care at Regis in Brighton, because I haven’t been coping at all well, partly through grief and partly because of my autism. I have “meltdowns” when something really unexpected happens. I have also been having frequent falls (albeit without serious injury), and fairly frequently lock myself out of the house. I also seem to have had a small stroke at some point according to scans. That might be contributing to the problems with balance. Even though Jen’s death is not unexpected, it doesn’t make it any easier to manage.I probably won’t be writing any more posts on Troppo until well after Jen’s death.Finally, there is a blog meet-up scheduled for Monday 25 August at 12.30pm at Sorsi and Morsi, an affordable Italian café in at the corner of Barkley and Blessington Streets, St Kilda. If you live in Melbourne we would love to see you. In the good old days there was quite frequent blog meet-ups, but social media no longer seems as social as it once was. Maybe we can revive it.