Please, Touch Me, I Pray.
FROM TIME TO TIME I HAVE ENCOUNTERED THE LUDICROUS: Advice columns wherein people have asked for clarity around romance and cancer. When I was diagnosed it wasn’t long before I found myself abandoned, facing my possible death alone. I felt disqualified from love and put it wholly out of my mind. How does love and attraction factor in to the reality of a cancer journey? What would I say to someone wondering if expressing attraction is even appropriate in such an extreme situation? What follows is my take.
So, You’re Attracted to Someone With Cancer. Here’s What Not to Do: Under no circumstances are you to tell them, unless you are fully prepared to make good on your attraction and own your part of the inherent risk. Cancer is existentially terrifying. It is isolating, it robs people of time, opportunity, dignity and spirit. In some cases, it has already cost cancer patients their relationships. Take my case: My partner split when I was nine weeks into radiation treatment for stage IV cancer. No goodbye. No see-ya-later. She simply packed up and moved out of our house; Gone. This is disturbingly common and there are no social sanctions for betrayal.
Over my year of chemo and radiation. I have had a few women, drawn to me, reach out with attraction and desire. Some have cut and run when the cancer reality asserts itself. That's caustic enough when both parties are healthy. When life-threatening illness is involved, banal indiscretions are amplified into the visceral. There's little worse when one lives daily in Bergmanesque tête-à-tête with death. When it comes to matters of the human heart, all the ineptitudes of youth take on new dimension when cancer lurks in the calculus.
Cancer changes the rules, makes the mundane dire. I see more and more of my peers facing this life-altering disease; playing by the awkward and passive social rules they've always been comfortable with; holding no guiding moral philosophy. With cancer, now is not the time for clumsiness; it's time to set some ground rules.
A nearly terminal diagnosis with Stage IV Cancer in my late thirties cost me everything: My home. My relationship. By business. My sense of trust in my own body. One year on, I am still here watching the world go by without me. Feeling robbed of time. Trying to stay alive, rebuilding in the ashes. Witnessing others get on with life, taking it all for granted. Being sidelined from the world doesn't arrest one's desires. The clock keeps ticking down; one does not get that time back. Feeling like nothing will ever change, disqualified from life and love; marked by an infirmity in all probability not of one's own making. Claustrophobia creeps in at the margins; an urgency to seize whatever opportunity for escape from present reality manifests in the form of work, or the warmth of a woman's hand on yours.
How to preserve one's character in the face of the absurd: A man must be friend and intimate to himself in that solemn and solitary province. A pilot traversing the Scylla and Charybdis of human intimate collision, cautious with his accumulation of intimacy lest he wind up wrecked on the shoals of expectation. In my battle with cancer, my only armour is to have no expectations. They tend to grow into metaphysical tumours, invading the organs of reality processing.
For those facing cancer, do not assume others grasp the gravity of your situation. The internal no-man's land that characterises your daily existence, pockmarked with the vagaries of endeavour while you try to stay in the world- holding out hope that if you survive there will still be a place for you in it. Instead, arm them with the charts of your inner boundaries, so they can navigate what bonds you enjoy with competence and grace. To live in expectancy sacrifices today for an uncertain tomorrow. There you place too much hope in what lies within fortune's dominion, while abandoning that which lies in yours. All you owe each other is the truth, but some things are better left unsaid until the soil has been tilled and seeds planted can bloom.