Terminal illness sucks, for so many reasons. But it's not the time to do things alone.
When someone in your life is facing the real battle, the battle that threatens to take their life and change those of the people that love them, people often find visiting them hard. They ask ‘am I crowding them? Does it make them feel we think they’re sicker than they are? Am I intruding?’ Friends and family are never intruders. No it doesn’t make them feel sicker. And maybe crowding them with love is just what they need.
It makes sense. It’s scary, it’s sad, it’s traumatic, it’s humbling and it signifies a change to the dynamic of all the relationships involved. Suddenly your strong friend, mother, dad or sister becomes an individual that has had to admit they need help. Sometimes help from yourself, sometimes doctors or nurses. Maybe for the little things like shopping, but often for the big things… like toileting, bathing and remembering. It’s a real hit to the person’s sense of self, their pride and confidence. But it shouldn’t let you forget who you are to them.
It’s very easy to forget how fragile we are as humans, until we are reminded when we see a loved one’s body failing them. The way a disease can strip a body of the strength to swallow, or the way it tears away the pride with every need to be helped up out of a chair. The strong spirit slowly fades behind a medication fog, slowly growing the seed of doubt in the loved one’s mind… is this the beginning of the end… or just another bump in the road?
So what if it is the downhill run of a long slog with cancer? You hear the overused phrases like ‘live every day as if it were your last’ so often that it’s easy to forget that you should. Diseases like cancer can rob us of our good days so swiftly that even if something is just a clinical setback, it’s also an opportunity to ask if you’re doing as much as you could for them and their families.
I urge you to risk the anger of a person whose pride has been upset in order to show them that you care. (And damn the illness for changing the way you show you care!) On no account do I believe it intrusive when you refuse to leave because they are so sick that today’s best views will be from the bathroom floor.
I’m not saying these times are easy to endure; in fact they’re the hardest you’ll ever encounter. But it’s actually part of the healing process. The healing process starts with accepting how sick your loved one is, and making every smile, every chance to say what it is you feel for them and every minute count. This isn’t the time to ask if you’re close enough to immerse yourself in their pain either, because if you’re considering it to begin with, I would say therein lays the answer. The worst thing you could do, is to ‘see how they are tomorrow’, or wait for a phone call to say, ‘now is the time’. No, you want to be there before that. Swallow your fear, and they can swallow their pride. Be there, and have no regrets.
