The well-meaning “stay strong” clichés aren’t always helpful. Before our own diagnosis, we probably said the same stupid things like “thankfully they caught it early” or “you’ve got this” to our friends and family with cancer.
When people hear cancer, they panic. They want to fix it and to give you hope. They reach for canned messaging because this is terrifying. Sadly, these sayings give us an opposite reaction. They often make us feel that being terrified, exhausted, or devastated is a sign of weakness or failure. They imply they we have control over an unpredictable disease. They force us to hide our misery to make the people around us feel more comfortable.
We know they mean well and we love them for trying. It’s hard for anyone to truly understand this level of fear unless they have lived through it themselves.
True support isn’t about finding the perfect, poetic thing to say. It is about being willing to sit in the dark with someone, so they don’t have to be alone.
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This is number 4 in a series of things caregivers and loved ones really need to hear, even if we don’t always have the courage to say them out loud. The unfiltered truth about what we are going through.
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