I got stabbed in the neck with a light tube during a wrestling “death match” two years ago. It was scary. I thought I was dying: your life does flash before your eyes.

I was stabbed in my 20s. It was a late-night mugging and, while taking my wallet, they stabbed me in my chest.

When I had a bicycle accident when I was 24. I was on a bridge going down; the bicycle broke and I smashed to the ground, face first. I broke my jaw and my teeth, and had to have plastic surgery. It all took half a year and then, funnily enough, I got my first big job – a TV series – with what I thought of then as this big, ugly scar.

Probably on a Los Angeles freeway.

But in the weeks after I learned that the breast cancer I have been in treatment for over the past year had spread to my bones — breaking my spine and becoming incurable and most likely fatal — finding the perfect living-room couch has begun to feel like the most important thing I’ve ever done.

So maybe I don’t try to figure it out. Maybe I just aim to get the couch right: strong bones, high-quality leather, something earthy and animal and real. A surface that knows something of what it was to be alive, that warms to our touch and cools in our absence. Also: an expansive bench that fits all of us. Something that will hold us through everything that lies ahead — the loving, collapsing and nuzzling. The dying, the grieving.

Downstairs, the boys gaze at a screen on the old futon in the playroom. We will figure out what to do about them soon enough. They probably already know what’s up and are waiting for us to figure out how to say it. Their very existence is the one dark piece I cannot get right within all this. I can let go of a lot of things: plans, friends, career goals, places in the world I want to see, maybe even the love of my life. But I cannot figure out how to let go of mothering them.