Should we be talking about cancer?
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@positive3negative thank you for posting the link for the Ted talk. I highly recommend it. It made me think of the reality of situations
If you actually look at the history of behaviour patterns of relations friends etc I am not sure they actually change.
So I will try not to be outraged at being ignored by some close relations . Perhaps I should focus on the card left at my doorstep by a neighbour. The card was homemade with a sprig of daphne sticky taped to the front.
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I suspect that it's not cancer people don't like talking about, it's death. Having taken the Jane Eyre attitude to same for most of my life (when the revolting Mr Brocklehurst asks the child Jane Eyre how she will avoid going to hell, she replies that she will keep in good health and not die. Seemed perfectly reasonable to me) I was as unprepared for a life threatening illness as anyone. How many of us didn't think "I am going to die" at first? For some, death has been all too close in their families, for some hardly at all. Either way, we are often not very well placed to deal with it. One of the few good things to come out of cancer for me, was coming to grips with the concept of death. Because one day I will die (at nearly 72 this is not exactly a premature realisation!!). Not now, quite probably not of cancer, but we will all end up the same way. So I did some work, got my head in a better place on this issue and was so much better equipped to be with my mother when she died. It's not morbid, it's part of life but it's not something everyone is ready to discuss, so that's often when the shutters come down. And we need to respect that. Our own brush with mortality is part of the new normal. It's just not shared by everyone.1
