Dad told me he had cancer on a visit back to Dublin from Stockholm so we could speak about it face to face. I skimmed the edges of a thought: he’s going to be here with his cancer and I’m going to be somewhere else. [ Oesophageal cancer: ‘People definitely rally around when they think you are going to pop your clogs’ ]Dad started telling friends. It was strange saying it out loud to people for the first time: “Dad has cancer.” It felt wrong in my mouth, like I was lying. Hearing people saying how sorry they were and if there was anything they could do was even stranger.

Source: The Irish Times May 13, 2024 14:53 UTC