Sumit Paul-Choudhury in The Guardian:
People reacted in different ways to my wife Kathryn’s diagnosis: an aggressive, fast-spreading ovarian cancer discovered after the miscarriage that ended our first and only pregnancy. A few understood that her future was likely to be grim and short; those people mostly kept quiet or stayed away. But many professed to believe that things would somehow work out – sometimes out of superstition, sometimes out of a desire to reassure, but most often simply because they could think of no other way to react.
Kathryn, for her part, insisted that those around her – her family, her friends, her colleagues and her doctors – only express hope. Naturally, that applied to me most of all, but I struggled to know how to accommodate her wishes. On the one hand, I’d always been inclined to look on the bright side, and some part of me believed it would all work out fine. On the other, I was an empirically minded rationalist. I read the medical reports and the scientific literature, and realised that her odds of surviving more than a couple of years were vanishingly small. But since I wasn’t the one with the terminal illness, I concluded that I should keep my mouth shut and be supportive in the way my wife had chosen, while hoping against hope for a statistical miracle.
No miracle came. Kathryn’s cancer overran her body’s defences in less than a year; she endured an unrehearsed and graceless death.
When it came to rebuilding my own life, the piece of advice I was given, over and over, was to “take it one day at a time”. No long-term plans, no significant life changes. I found that unsatisfactory.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.