Being told you have cancer is heartbreaking. So is telling the people you love you have cancer. The February night my doctor stayed late in her office to tell me and my husband the bad news—that I did indeed have ovarian cancer, and not fibroid cysts as I’d been hope upon hoping—she asked me, as I looked at her in lip-bitten silence, if I was OK. “No,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, as we sat in the Frontenac Starbucks parking lot, calling our parents, both sets, who were home with our young kids, worrying and putting dinner on, the world turned cinematic. The rain poured down, my husband held the cellphone to his ear and held himself together, and I couldn’t look past the fogged windshield. I kept wondering how such a big city could suddenly feel so small. Were they OK, there on the other line? No. Of course not.
No one wants to put their friends and family through anguish. And yet, as I’ve been shown over and over these past 10 months, my supportive, loving family and friends want nothing more than to be right there with me, no matter what that means. And we’re all like that, I guess: in it for the bad as well as the good.
Of course, knowing what to do and say, and not do and not say, can be confusing. While each cancer experience is unique, I thought sharing some things our family found helpful might help other St. Louisans be better friends and family members to those in need.
THINGS TO DO
Assume that surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation are terrible and that the person will feel awful at a cellular and spiritual level. They will need real help, and you can give it. Coordinating your meal-planning or other efforts within neighborhoods or through Facebook friend groups can take the burden off of individuals and strengthen bonds between support people.
Hold a fundraising benefit. Even with health insurance, meeting deductibles after something like this can take a chunk out of the budget. Loss of income also comes into play. When I was sick, some amazing friends got together and threw a big party. Nerinx Hall lent its gym, artist friends donated artwork, musician friends brought their bands out to play, and foodie friends donated food. The money raised from tickets and a successful silent auction allowed our family to shoulder the financial burden of missed work and extra bills without going under. Plus, we got to have a big old fun party in the middle of an otherwise terrible time, and that seemed almost as important as the help.
Give gift cards. The very best presents we got in the mail were grocery-store gift cards. They’re small and easy to keep handy so you can use them whenever you want to, and they put the power in the hands of the person you’re helping.
Find out about The Wellness Community. This is an amazing resource for cancer patients and their support people that offers everything from therapist-led support groups to nutrition counseling. While it’s a club no one would ask to join, membership with such strong and wise people is humbling and does have its privileges, not the least of which is free—that’s right, I said free—yoga for patients/survivors and their caregivers (314-238-2000).
Communicate and give support through caringbridge.com. This is one of those things you just don’t know about until you, or someone you love, is suffering. Just after my surgery, my Aunt Caroline thoughtfully set up a site for me, and throughout my treatment, I used its online journal to keep my loved ones in the loop about my care and to process what was happening. There’s a guestbook for people to write messages, and some days, reading everyone’s prayers and warm wishes was quite literally the only thing that kept me going.
When you offer help, be specific about what you can do. “I can pick up your kids anytime this weekend for a play date” or “I happen to love laundry, and so I’m here to collect your dirty clothes for washing” is better than the well-meaning “Call me if you need anything.” I think it’s because A) the person may need so much they don’t know where to begin and B) the person probably feels as if they’re such a burden that asking someone to do one more thing is harder than just letting it go undone.
THINGS NOT TO DO
Don’t give cancer more power than it already has. Yes, being told you have cancer is bad. Very bad, even. But so are many other things, like, say, being drawn and quartered or getting into a terrible car accident. Somehow we’ve become so afraid of cancer that, as my friend Mike Elliff, a Kripalu yoga teacher and 4th-stage non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor, says, “Some people probably die just from the shock of hearing it.” We’ve got to take away the terror we have of the very word. “What would happen,” Mike asks, “if we started calling it ‘the little c’?” Think about it.
Don’t give unsolicited information. As Han Solo said in the original Star Wars, “Never tell me the odds.” While Lance Armstrong might like to know how unlikely he is to win a race or a cancer battle, because it makes him fight that much harder, many would prefer not to attach a number to their chances for survival or know every potential side effect of their kind of chemo. Even if you’ve looked way into it and have a lot to share, maintaining an “If they don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is probably best.
Similarly, I can pretty much guarantee that no one with cancer wants to hear about the person you know who died from cancer. Please limit your stories to those in which the person survived and is doing just fine now, thank you very much.
Don’t give the person too much stuff. Someone going through cancer isn’t equipped with the usual energy stores required to sort, store, recycle, or re-gift, so it’s best not to load the person down with too many gifts. A perfect thing or two, obviously, is fine. Offers to help figure out where to put everything everyone else has given might just make you the savior you hope to be.
Don’t ask what symptoms the person had or expect them to explain their kind of cancer to you. This is a tricky one. Yes, there absolutely should be more information about how to know if you should be checked for everything from ovarian cancer to brain tumors, but your friend who just got diagnosed shouldn’t be that resource. It’s difficult to have your private life suddenly become so very public. Don’t know what an osteosarcoma is? That’s why we have Google.
WAYS TO BE IN A WORLD WITH CANCER
Remember that everyone would rather be a giver than a receiver, so act from empathy, not pity. The Buddhist teacher Rodney Smith says that we pity people because we want to pretend that what is happening to them couldn’t happen to us. This shields us from the harsh reality that it could indeed happen to us, but it also keeps the person we want to help at arm’s length. Use your reaching out as an exercise in embracing your own vulnerability.
More and more people are living with cancer rather than dying from it. That means that the person going slowly in front of you in the grocery store or lagging behind at work might be dealing with a chronic disease. Remembering this gives us all just one more reason to be nice to people.
Be kinder to the environment. Do you remember learning in history class that noblewomen used arsenic to lighten their skin? Looking back, we think, “How terrible—if only they’d known better!” You may also know that recent studies show newborns have, on average, more than 200 chemicals already in their system. There just has to be a correlation between the way we treat our world and the fact that so many people are getting cancer. OK, but what do you do with that information? Slow down and listen to your intuition. Styrofoam, plastic containers, vinyl, unsafe cleaning products, zooming everywhere in cars—all these things are conveniences that we’ve come to rely upon but that really aren’t sustainable. Make eco-friendly changes not only for the celestial body known as Earth, but for your celestial body, too.
Slow down and take time for the people you love, regardless of whether they have cancer. Easier said than done. And more important than anything else on this list. 7
Maud Kelly is a poet, teacher, and ovarian-cancer survivor whose work has most recently appeared in Best American Poetry 2009. She lives in Webster Groves with her husband, two children, and an insane amount of gratitude for her oncologist, Dr. Kevin Easley, his nurses, Danielle, Kim, and Bridget, and her brave, generous family and friends.
