When friends hear you are sick, they visit, call, or write to offer support. This matters immensely: Do it.
Sometimes they also want to discuss issues in their own lives. They usually start with an apology, "but it's nothing like what you are going through." If you are the visitor, you want to give the patient space to tell you about their state. That's why you came. But you needn't apologize for sharing troubles of your own. Let me explain why.
Everyone suffers. I've heard a patient complain that their insensitive friend talked about a lesser calamity, the loss of her dog. "Doesn't she get that I Have Cancer?" But everyone suffers. Is it only the worst-off person who has standing to express her needs? In the case at hand, animals matter; I have mourned the loss of companions who I loved and loved me.
Moreover, cancer is overrated. The night I spent in the Emergency Department waiting for the diagnosis I knew would be cancer wasn't the worst night I've spent in an ED. That would be the night spent with a severely injured child.
When you share your burdens with a cancer patient, you allow them to be your friend. A visiting friend may be concerned that asking the patient to empathize with her concerns will be an excessive burden given "what you are going through." But is that how relationships work? Talking about your struggles lets me into your life; it allows me to be your friend, someone who listens. I don't want to be kept out because I have cancer.
When you allow me to support you, you help me recover part of what I've lost. We want to love and be loved. Very unfortunately, we fear that we do not have the qualities that will make us lovable: wealth, intelligence, beauty, power: the whole catastrophe.
Cancer takes this away. You can't work, it's hard to think, and your body is withered and disfigured. You were an agent; now you're a patient, someone to whom things are done, not someone who does.
The core problem here, though, isn't just the illness. It's that we misunderstand love. To love someone is to value their experience and well-being in the way I value my own. Love doesn't abolish the boundaries between us; it doesn't permit you to treat me however you like. What love means is that I want you to have what is good in life in the way I want for myself. Perfect love entails perfect attention to the other. To that end, I need to know what's happening.
If you understand love this way, you see that cancer does not take away our capacity to love. I may be withered and scarred, but I can attend and listen. My remaining time is valuable because I retain the ability to love. Talking to me and allowing me to be with you, these things keep me alive.
Dear Bill, this post is, in its quiet way, stupendous. You are growing.
Thank you so much for this information! I'd also like to know is it ok to ask questions about what the cancer patient is going through. I know someone with cancer and when I see him I ask about what he's going through. However, I have another friend who says I shouldn't bring his illness up unless he does first. I'd love your take!