My Story

Friday 27 October 2017

Guilt

I don't believe in soulmates. I don't believe that my husband and I were the only ones for each other. We met, we hit it off, we became a couple, we fell in love. My husband is in his mid-thirties. When I am gone, I very much want him to find love again, to move on. Thoughts of my husband being lonely upset me much more than the thought of no longer being present on this earth. In the wake of my diagnosis, I was plagued by guilt, the feeling that my husband had chosen the wrong one.The lack of belief in soulmates has a strange duality to it. On the one hand, it means that I believe he can move on with someone else in the future. On the other hand, it makes me think that in the six years we've been together, he could have met someone else who would be able to shimmy into old age with him. So it both does and doesn't bring me comfort all at the same time. It's troubling. And it will never resolve. I've told my husband that I am never not going to feel guilty about the fact that I'll be vamoosing sometime in the near future. And it's truth. Guilt will be a constant bedfellow of mine until I breath my last.

This seems to be very common among terminal illness sufferers, if not universal. Guilt can assail me at any moment - "Why was I so mean to that girl in school?", "Why did I borrow that money from my mother that I now can't pay back and she can scarcely afford to be without?", "Why won't I be around to help my parents in their dotage?". It is acutely felt at times, almost the point of hypersensitivity. And there is no resolution, not really. And that is layered on top of all the other crap that comes with this diagnosis. I must prepare myself for death, cope with the treatments and pain and progression and on top of it, deal with the roiling mental turmoil that comes with dealing with the niggling thoughts that sometimes crowd my head. Terminal illness never, ever lets up. It is multi-faceted. It's an endurance test. A never-ending obstacle course. From the moment the consultant responded to my query "Is it cancer?" with a hesitant pause, any facet of my life that was carefree took flight forever. Life will never be carefree again, I will never again experience the pure excitement of hope and insouciance and burgeoning opportunity. Any piece of happiness I will ever feel again will be offset by the deadening and ever-present reminder of the life sentence I have been handed. That was something that I felt keenly and actively mourned for in the months after my diagnosis. It has got easier to deal with but it will always be with me to some extent. As clichéd as it sounds, a part of me died when that consultant hesitatingly confirmed my worst fears. And the part that died was replaced by something much worse - guilt that will be with me forever more.

1 comment:

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