A Cancer of the Soul

On 11th January 2018 I was diagnosed with a terminal illness; grief for a dead child. Sounds a bit melodramatic I guess, but true nonetheless. There’s no cure, and treatment is at best hit or miss. This disease eats away at you from the inside. It corrodes. It takes away so much of you, physically and mentally. Some of the effects are predictable. Anger, fatigue and sadness. Others come as a surprise; loss of motivation, self confidence and decision-making. Over time you gradually weaken, you never recover lost ground. At best you can hope to stand still for a while. Everything is two steps forward, three steps back. Talking in cliches is the worst!

Some people choose to pretend it hasn’t happened to them and hide from it. But the corrosion is still going on and eventually it will catch up with you. The grief is insidious in its effects. It is doing its work out of sight, quietly destroying parts of you. It is a cancer of its own. Just like the cancer that killed Evie, this one eventually gets you.

But ………. the worst part is that it doesn’t shorten your life. It just makes that life more difficult, more painful. It takes away self-confidence, inner resolve, energy and motivation. It accentuates the weaker areas of your mind, and hides the stronger parts, camouflaging them so that you can’t draw on them. Many parts of our physical selves will regenerate if damaged, heal sometimes with a scar, but heal nonetheless. The death of a child prevents that healing when it comes to your soul.

The death of a child causes part of you to die too. And then it takes your resistance, your ability to fight off ‘infection’. It’s as if the white blood cells of your soul have died too. So how do you fight this evil little cancer? What is the emotional equivalent of chemo or radio therapies? This is the tricky part. There’s no one size fits all treatment. You have to find your own way. For me it’s part work, part creativity, part walking. Covid-19 aside, it doesn’t cure, it just slows the progress of the disease. There’s no remission, no bell to ring at the end of your treatment.

To find the treatment that you need, you have to experiment, try out different things and see what works. Then you have to adapt them as time goes on to keep up with how the cancer is evolving, mutating as it does its work. Luckily there’s a lot of advice out there, lots of ideas to draw upon. Sadly, I’m not the only bereaved parent, and I won’t be the last either. I can draw upon the experiences of others to look for ideas. I’ve discounted more than I care to remember, but equally there are other things that can help.

The key though is that you have to want to do something about it, and that is harder than you might think. But you can do it. Friends, real friends, are the key. To those true friends that have helped us …. thank you.