🏡 Cancer Diary: Living Next Door to Cancer

 

They weren’t close before. Just two of my neighbors, one downstairs, one in the next lot. Young mothers in their mid-thirties, each with two children, each newly diagnosed—one with uterine cancer, one with lymphoma.

Now they spend long evenings together. Drinking. Laughing. Talking about men, though both are married. Not about cancer. Never about cancer.

They slip into a kind of fantasy hour—where the diagnoses don’t exist, where their bodies haven’t betrayed them, where they’re still the girls they used to be. Or maybe the girls they never got to be.

It’s not denial in the dramatic sense. It’s something softer, sadder. A shared numbness. A counter-life. They get drunk too fast to talk about anything real. And maybe that’s the point.

The rest of us—neighbors, friends, watchers—feel the pull. We want to speak. We want to say, Please don’t wait too long. But we also know they won’t hear it. Not now. Not in this fragile world they’ve built together.

So we hover in the silence. Compelled to talk. Compelled to be quiet. Bearing witness to a kind of grief that hasn’t yet been named.

🌀 Postscript: A Lens of Understanding

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five emotional stages that often accompany grief and illness: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Not as a checklist, but as a fluid, human map.

What we’re seeing here may live in the realm of Denial—but not the loud kind. This is the kind that giggles. That pours another drink. That builds a temporary world where cancer doesn’t exist.

And maybe, for now, that’s the only world they can bear.

Definitely, for now, all I seem able to do is watch an implosion from the outside, knowing what is quite likely to come but having only words that are not welcome, information that is not welcome, support that is considered unneeded. I could point them to Cancer Diary resources, to community resources, to resources that would be immediately proffered by other neighbors, but they will not accept any of that. It does not match the world they have built for themselves.

If any of you have family, friends, neighbors like this, my heart goes out to you. My best wishes and prayers go those in your circle who are like my neighbors. And, if you are not familiar with the work of Kubler-Ross, now would be a good time to read it.

For other Cancer Diary posts, click HERE.

Blog editor's note: As a memorial to Carl, 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 CCC is expanded and updated weekly. As part of this effort, each week, on Monday, this blog will carry an informative, cancer-related story -- and be open to guest posts: Cancer Diary. 

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