Dying, he keeps to sunny side

“All of a sudden my brain stopped working,’’ is the way Lowe, 74, puts it. He was soon diagnosed with glioblastoma, the aggressive, terminal brain cancer that killed Senator Ted Kennedy. Doctors couldn’t tell him why he’d gotten it, so Lowe began researching. The result is a slender e-book he has written, “Brain Cancer: Beating the Odds.’’ The book is free, but he asks for a donation to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

“Even as he is dying, he is trying to make a contribution to others as he has done his whole life,’’ Tapping says.

The odds Lowe has beaten so far: The average life span after diagnosis is 15 months. He has had it 26 months and he’s still living at home, playing cribbage every Monday night with friends, following his beloved Red Sox avidly, enjoying Mercia’s beautiful gardens. Until a few months ago, he was still seeing patients in his Plymouth office one day a week.

“I’m feeling fine and doing well,’’ says Lowe, dressed in khakis and a striped shirt, relaxing in a chair in his den. “I’ve just got these deficits that aren’t too pleasant.’’ Those would be some memory issues and an imbalance caused by medications.

Lowe is convinced that his golf-ball sized tumor, which doctors at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital removed, resulted from his years of excessively using cellphones. Besides his offices, which he had in Stoughton, Newton, Plymouth, and elsewhere, Lowe also did “brief counseling,’’ where clients would call in, from all over the world, for phone consultations. “I had been spending several hours [a day] with my cellphone pressed against the right side of my head,’’ he writes in his e-book.