I’m a cancer survivor and it was a huge shock to find that once treatment was finished my life didn’t just go back to normal. I had no idea what normal was anymore and it didn’t help that everyone (including me) expected me to go back to being the person I was before my diagnosis. I ended up having a breakdown because all the feelings that I’d pushed down finally burst through the dam wall I’d built once I no longer had the security of knowing ‘something was being done’ about my cancer. I had also resigned from my job after I’d finished chemo so I had nothing else to focus on.
While I was undergoing treatment I didn’t want to worry my family by telling them how scared, angry, despairing, ripped off and generally devastated I was feeling. I thought they would be so upset that I’d have to worry about them as well as myself.
I moved to a different city and my new oncologist recommended that I attend a support group. I’d tried this in my home town but everyone there was so damned upbeat and ‘positive’ all the time that I thought there clearly must be something wrong with me. The message I got was that I had to be brave and cheerful and positive and just get on with things – the implication being that if I wasn’t then I wouldn’t get better.
However, the support group that my oncologist referred me to was run by a counsellor who’d had her own cancer experience and we were encouraged to express everything that we were feeling. I cried at every weekly meeting for six months and nobody ever told me to get over it, pull my sox up, move on, cheer up. Nobody tried to fix it or tell me what to do.
I learned that I was grieving the loss of my pre-cancer life and often an event that causes grief in the present will bring up unresolved grief from a person’s past. So all the tears I shed helped me to heal a lot of stuff going back years and years. Being allowed to be a mess was the best possible medicine for me at that time. My fellow group members supported me to eventually find a new normal for myself.
If only more people had access to this kind of support; a place where they don’t feel they have to edit what they say and where everyone else there in the room understands. With the best will in the world, those who have not been there can’t understand, and that’s why I found it so helpful to be able to talk freely knowing that I didn’t have to justify myself.
A lot of people seem to think that talking about death hastens it. When someone is terminally ill, talking about dying doesn’t make it happen any faster. I believe that talking openly and honestly about our fears around death well before we are actually facing it can create depths of intimacy that enriches all our lives.
