Nothing Wrong with Nuts...Telling Your Parents You Have Breast Cancer

Excerpted from Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family—in another city. -George Burns

My father was a WWII Navy veteran, born in Toledo, Ohio. After the war, the GI bill sent him to college and he trained as an electrical engineer. My mother was a farm girl from Maumee, Ohio who came from a family of ten children.

Intelligent, insightful, empathetic conversation around the dinner table was not part of the deal in my childhood. Nor were compliments on anyone’s appearance or high I.Q. The deal was—safety, security and structure and eating the food mom prepared as fast as possible, before it got cold.

I was a heavy-duty reader as a child and spent a lot of time imagining I was in the brooding, haunting Wuthering Heights or living the life of the melancholy, triumphant Jane Eyre. Because I was so in touch with fantasy, I quickly learned to fantasize my life, as well as my family. We remained in California for my entire childhood however, and because I was so in touch with fantasy, it was easy enough for me to start fantasizing my family. My down-to-earth parents became better than they were—to the point that I often gushed to my friends about how wonderful they were and how they supported and understood me.

A good friend pointed out the discrepancy, many, many years later. Concerned about where this was leading me, she told me that my parents weren’t the perfect people I kept insisting they were. It was like a bell went off. DING!

She also pointed out that I was secretly angry with my family and my insistence on their perfection kept reinforcing that anger. Like many adult children I had refused to acknowledge who my parents really were and then I got upset when they didn’t give me what I expected from them. I needed to align my expectations with my actual family and not my fantasies of my family. Especially since I wasn’t the Angel in the House as a child, to say the least, and may my parents forgive me.

When parents hear about an adult child’s cancer, they’re devastated. Many are already wondering how many autumns they have left, and now they have to deal with the fact their child may not have that many either. Besides, why is their child seriously ill, instead of them? (It’s not supposed to happen that way.) And if their child dies before them, who is going to help them when their time comes? Because it is so unexpected, few, very few, parents are able to support their adult child in the way he or she needs to be supported. Instead, they usually collapse. That’s why it’s often said that when an individual gets cancer, their whole family gets cancer.

I lost a parent during my cancer experience, my father-in-law, a man I treasured deeply. Compellingly alive in the midst of his own end-of-life experience, he was an anchor to me. He died, I lived, but he helped me to understand that dying can be a time of learning and growth. A time of deepening our love, our awareness of what is important in life and our commitment to spiritual beliefs and practices. Death can even be an opportunity to gain insight into the true nature of ourselves and all things, an insight that will enable us to become free from all suffering.

I also had to deal with a family relationship that was basically destructive. All of us have those relationships, whether we recognize them or not. Some member of our extended family—be it aunt, uncle, younger sister, grown-up stepchild or distant cousin—has always done their damnedest to upset us. And because they are family, they know exactly how to do it.

After cancer, all relationships change—rapidly, radically. Once the disease strikes, we must protect ourselves emotionally; or die. Empty, meaningless or destructive relationships are a menace, because they steal the energy required to fight the disease. Those destructive relationships have always been toxic; now they become lethal. It’s time to bail.

Even with a profoundly normal family, breast cancer changes our obligations. It teaches us to shake free of our caretaker compulsions, because we simply can’t carry other people’s burdens anymore. Our most important job has become taking care of ourselves.

A large segment of the general population believes that being constantly upbeat and positive is the best way to cope with cancer. (If you don’t agree, think of all the relentlessly positive survivor stories in the popular magazines.) But unvarnished optimism denies cancer patients the opportunity to confront their real fears. We need to ask: best for whom? What is best for the individual will depend totally on the individual and vary wildly. What is best for the family is obviously to be as little reminded of the cancer patient’s emotional pain as possible.

A truly saintly cancer patient would put on a brave front for the family’s sake. But saintliness is not a requirement for cancer patients. We have as much right to express ourselves as anyone else. Too much talk about what’s an admirable response and not enough about what helps us cope with their situation is a selfish response by society.

The reality is that cancer brings out not only our own fears, but the fears of our life partner, children, siblings and parents. It’s a huge heap of fear and we won’t be able to sort it out for a long time. Without meaning to, other family members vent on us their anguish and terror. Without thinking, they demand comfort from us, at the very time we need it from them.

And we try to help them, because society and family conditioning has taught to put ourselves last. Women in our society are the caregivers. Time and again, women told me that when they received a cancer diagnosis, the first thing they worried about was how much it will wound family and friends to hear it. At the very time they should be giving care and concern to themselves, they were feeling guilty, worrying how their diagnosis would hurt others.

It does hurt them, of course. It’s incredibly painful to hear that a loved one has cancer. And, over and over again, our family and friends react to the hurt by hurting us in return. If we fear a bad reaction from any member of your family, it’s best to shield ourselves. We can let someone else break the news. Our loved one’s grief might tear to pieces what is left of our composure.

Later, after they’ve calmed down, we can tell our family how we want them to respond. We can ask them not to cry in front of us. We can tell them not to serve up verbal gloom and doom, but to bring over dinner occasionally instead. We can tell them not to damage our self-esteem by remarking on changes in our appearance. We can carefully describe their role: comforting, advising, reassuring and running an occasional errand. And we can describe what is NOT their role: being paranoid, tearful or anxious.

A lot of things are now more important than keeping our family content, so we must balance our own needs against theirs for a change. After all, we’re the one holding the higher card.