Cancer Patients and the Cards We Give Them

An interesting piece here about the kinds of cards one former cancer patient would have liked to have received during her treatment. 

 

Most of the cards seem either funny, or heartfelt, or both, but don't they proceed from the same assumption as the more common--though presumably deficient--kinds of sympathy and get-well-soon cards?  Namely, the assumption that the kind of person who would give a card to a cancer patient can have (either through the card, or otherwise) a meaningful impact on the cancer patient's experience? 

I guess I'm falling back here on an experience of the disease and of treatment which not every patient has--that it reduces one's world to essentials.  During treatment, I needed my wife.  I needed the rest, the repose that could be had in the lee of her physical and psycho-emotional shelter.  And I needed the tether to normalcy that my parents and other family provided.  But beyond that, what could anybody really say or do?  It was my job to survive, just to keep breathing until it was all over and I could get on with trying to stand myself up straight again (still working on that, by the way).  And nobody else could do that for me; certainly no card could. Cards were more for those who gave them than for me. 

And--a crucial point--there's nothing wrong with that.  It's ok that nobody could really help me, or be a part of my experience.  And it's ok if someone wants to take action against their own fear or confusion or impotence by the affirmative act of sending a card.  I don't mind. 

Thing is, from the moment of diagnosis, a division arises between the patient and his or her healthy compatriots.  And it was nobody else's fault that they had no idea what was happening to me, or to me with respect to them, or to them with respect to me.  And so I never needed or expected any of them to come up with a card (or a letter, or text, or email, etc., for that matter) that said the right thing.  There was no right thing.  The magnitude of the facts overwhelmed the possibility of saying the right thing, or anything at all, really.  The brute experience was its own meaning, and it happened in silence, and you can't expect anybody who hasn't gone through that to understand it, with or without a well-considered and deeply sincere empathy card.