A Year To Live, A Year To Die

Following on from The Emotional Rollercoaster of Caring, I've just come across the searingly honest A Year to Live, A Year to Die. I strongly recommend that you read through the essays and listen to the recordings. It's a complex story of compassion and anger, the juxtaposed emotions that are familiar to so many carers. The widow disusses her grief and the social pressures about discussing health issues.

The background of the story is that:

Mary Beth Kirchner [the producer] received an extraordinary offer from someone who was entering what would likely be the most difficult time of his life. Stewart Selman had just been told he had a malignant brain tumor, and he said he wanted to keep an audio diary.

To tell the complete story, Kirchner asked Rebecca Peterson, Selman's widow, to listen to the diary and share her own memories of his final months. The resulting stories, intimate and full of hard truths, describe how terminal illness can usher a life to its end.

Stewart returns from hospital with the news of his diagnosis with a brain tumour:

I just felt terrible and I really had these incredible feelings of guilt, that I was abandoning my wife. We had made this lifetime deal. I wasn't going to be there when we were old or whatever and she was going to be left with my children and it would be much, much harder.

On a follow-up visit, Rebecca remembers that the neurologist said:

there's a lot of different ways people handle it. But there are some families can pull together and achieve this kind of transcendence.

Rebecca has a hard time matching that rhetoric to the experience of herself and her family: