Cancer Diary: Contours of the Last Days
There’s more hope these days when it comes to cancer—if it’s caught early, you’ve got a fighting chance. But people still die. Every year, every month, every day.
Carl did.
And recently, I stumbled across an article I wish had found its way to me before he died. It was written by Barbara Karnes, and it laid out something I hadn’t heard said quite so plainly before: “We die the way we live.” That line stopped me cold.
Because she’s right—at least about Carl.
He was an introvert to the core. Even after his diagnosis, there were no late-night heart-to-hearts, no raw confessions, no leaning into each other with the kind of aching honesty I craved. He simply couldn’t go there. And that silence—it wears on a caregiver.
Carl was also an ostrich. I don’t say that with judgment. It’s just... true. All through our life together, I handled the hard stuff. He stayed sunny, cheerful, often by refusing to acknowledge the storm clouds altogether. Denial was his way of coping. It was how he kept himself going. But when cancer came, that pattern didn’t change. He looked the other way. And I was left holding not just the logistics of dying, but the emotional weight of it too.
If you’re walking that path—loving someone who's dying, especially when they can’t or won’t talk about it—I want to hand you this article: “We Die the Way We Live: Patterns at the End of Life.” It won’t fix the ache, but it may help you name it.
Would you like to shape this further—maybe add in a sensory detail, or echo the rhythm of your other blog posts or chapters? I’d be honored to keep working with you on it.
For other Cancer Diary posts, click HERE.
Blog editor's note: As a memorial to Carl Leaver, MSI Press graphic arts director and designer, who died of Cancer of Unknown Primary August 16, 2021, and simply because it is truly needed, MSI Press is now hosting a web page, Carl's Cancer Compendium, as a one-stop starting point for all things cancer, to make it easier for those with cancer to find answers to questions that can otherwise take hours to track down on the Internet and/or from professionals. The web page is in its infancy but expected to expand into robustness. To that end, it is expanded and updated weekly. As part of this effort, each week, on Monday, this blog carries an informative, cancer-related story -- and is open to guest posts: Cancer Diary.
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