Category Archives: Terminal Cancer, Day by Day

Terminal Cancer, Day by Day

Loneliness & other strange feelings

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I’ve been feeling strange lately, and only recently identified the feeling as loneliness. I don’t get lonely often. I’m an introvert and have more solitary hobbies than time to enjoy them. But these days I feel like I don’t have anyone to talk to. My friends are busy with their own lives, preoccupied if not blissfully happy with newborn babies, celebrating their own milestone birthdays and anniversaries, running their own businesses. Many have offered support, but I don’t want to mess their lives up with all this grief.

I can remember two other times when I felt lonely.

In 1998, my parents helped me get settled into my first home-away-from-home, in residence at university. We waved goodbye and they drove off, and I was completely alone, knowing no one in the city. I felt lonely, and it was a strange, unpleasant, panic-inducing feeling. I walked to the cafeteria for a welcome orientation event and had made friends within the hour.

The other time was when a three-year relationship ended, and I realized I’d just lost my best friend. I was in my new bachelor apartment and wondering what to do with my spare time. I felt the brief panic of loneliness, then started calling up girl friends and planning nights out.

I was able to remedy both these instances, and so I’ve been struggling to figure this one out too. Technically I haven’t lost my best friend, yet. Technically I’m not a single parent. But I feel like a best-friend-less single parent. I want some time and a safe place to adjust, to recharge my introvert batteries and to connect with people who can understand what’s happening to me and my family. But I spend my days running after a toddler and trying to support my sick husband. I feel like there are numerous albatrosses hanging around my neck, many worlds resting on my shoulders. I want a quiet moment to put down all this weight and sleep, rest, just pause the world so I can take a breath and catch up.

Terminal Cancer, Day by Day

The Future and The Past

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We no longer talk about the future beyond a month or so. Practically speaking, we don’t know how Brock will feel day to day or even throughout the day, so we live in the moment and don’t plan too definitely.

And there is always that knowledge that he won’t be part of the long-term future, of my future or our son’s. But also, I feel like I’m losing my future too. When he purged his book collection, I purged mine too. We’d lost that shared vision of a house with a huge library and there was no point in my holding on to books that were good but not good enough to be worthy of long-term storage.

It occurred to me the other day that, when Brock dies, the last ten years of my life will die too. There is no one else to share those memories and inside jokes and little references with. Every movie we’ve watched together or conversation we’ve had has created this language of shared experience, and I’ll be the only one speaking it, with no one to talk to who will understand. The phrase “she’ll do,” for example, has hilarious connotations only for us.

I’m about to lose ten years of my life and my future all at once. This is why “grieving” is a long-term stage. I’ve been grieving the decline and loss of my best friend for almost two years now, and the horror of it will only get worse.

What makes it harder is that I can’t really talk to my best friend about it, because he’s the one who is dying. He’s losing his future and past literally, not just in an abstract emotional way. I have the easier road. I can’t let the sadness take me down, because my responsibility and role is to help him through his and be his champion. It is a privilege to do this for him. I will enable everything that makes him happy and gives him peace.