When someone you love has cancer, it can feel like the whole world has curled into itself, folding into nothing but that one person, that person you love so much. It’s intense, this cancer journey. It can be long and dark and twisted and bewildering, harrowing, terrifying, lonely, and deeply, deeply agonising … and not just for the ones fighting the disease.
There are endless mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, wives and husbands and lovers and sisters and brothers and cousins and friends who are the silent soldiers at the sides of those who they love most, those who are fighting the fight of their lives.
Believe me, those silent soldiers are suffering too.
Not in the way that the cancer patient is fighting or suffering. This isn’t about comparisons. It could never be. This is about reminding people that you are in this fight too.
Because they don’t see what you do
Others don’t really see it. They don’t know that you’re the son who has to carry his father to the bathroom as if he were a tiny child, or that you’re the daughter who has to cleanse unspeakable wounds. Or the wife who suddenly finds herself changing her husband’s diapers.
They don’t know that you have to spend hours cleaning up the blood. Or that you have to live the patient’s fears so deeply that your teeth feel like they’re about to shatter. That you have to be the bright and chirpy one when that’s what the patients need you to be. Or the life of the party when they need you to be, the clown, the motivator, the instigator, the believer, the bucket-holder, the mopper-upper, the getter of pills, the communicator, the consoler, the eternal listener, the shoulder to cry on.
They could never know
They don’t know that you have to be the chameleon, ever changing, ever adapting to the needs of that one person in your life with cancer. They don’t know that you are everything to that one person … and suddenly nothing else at all.
They don’t know what it’s like when those massive radioactive doors close with your love on the other side, when you watch as they stick needles into their arms, tattoo their skins, lift them onto the scales. Stroke their bald heads.
They don’t know what it’s like when there’s nobody but you and your love is screaming in pain, when the blood soaks the pillows, and there’s nobody left to blame.
But I see you
I’ve been there. I have my own tiny understanding of what you, the constant, silent, soldier, are going through. And as you read these words, I’m holding you in a well of empathy. I’m sending you gentle hugs. I’m telling people not to forget you. I’m telling them to see you too, as you stand lost in the shadows of the patient.
Because you may not be the one dying, but you are in this too.
And as a gentle reminder to you, try, as much as you can, to look after yourself in all this too.
