TODAY (actually, a couple of weeks ago) in an e-mail from my ex-wife Kathy* I got a sense that she doesn’t remember when exactly I was in treatment for cancer. It seems odd that she might think that we were still together at the time, since she was actually quite out of the loop.
15 YEARS AGO, I got a frantic phone call.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Kathy asked in a demanding tone.
My honest answer, which didn’t sound true but was, was that I was hardly telling anyone.
I don’t think it was denial — I was confronting this disease head-on. I think it was something more like pride. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who constantly brought up my condition and my suffering, fishing for sympathy and attention. So I didn’t talk about it to strangers, or friends, or anyone who didn’t already know because I saw them regularly. With close friends we mostly discussed it in the context of scheduling – we can’t get together on this date, I have a clinic appointment.
“The Ex” and what and whether to tell her was hardly on my mind. It did dawn on me eventually that I had to tell her something, as the treatment schedule would interfere with visiting my four-year-old son – not to mention the fact that my strained finances would affect the paying of child support. I was still deliberating this when she called out of the blue, having heard from others about my condition.
The bigger concern, back when I was first diagnosed, was what to tell Mom.
It would be wrong for me to keep this from her, but Gwen and I felt we had to be careful with the news. Mom had buried her husband less than a year and a half earlier – and it was cancer that killed him. But what Dad had was intestinal tumors that spread to the liver; my case was different. So when we told her, I made sure to emphasize that we had caught it early, and the doctors' optimism, that they were even saying “cure.”
That optimistic prognosis was another reason I didn’t make a big deal of it. I wasn’t dying. I knew that, odds were, in less than a year it would all be behind me and I’d be getting on with my life cancer-free.
Not that it would be an easy road getting to that point.
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*Not her real name
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Strange how that was similar to my reaction to learning Dad's diagnosis. I didn't want to tell most people because I didn't want it to be the thing everybody talked about. Better for it to be private and life continue as normally as possible.
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