#FuckCancer thread: Like so many, I was shocked to find out about the recent death of actor and culture icon, #ChadwickBoseman. I was also surprised to find out he had been battling #ColonCancer for the past four years. But in looking at it from his persepective...

It wasn’t all that surprising. Cancer is a blight, no question. The trouble is, once someone knows you have it, the intensely private nature of that fear and struggle is no longer exclusively your own. There’s something to be said for friends and support...

But so often, friends impose their own expectations upon the suffering without knowing or ever realizing it. Not all cancers are the same, you see. Not all cancers require surgery. Not all cancers require chemotherapy. And when someone comes out about having cancer...

And they’re not wearing the appropriate “cancer costume,” we assume they must be doing great, and we tell them so. I don’t doubt the sincerity of any of the friends who said the same about my wife in her cancer struggle, but just the same, hearing that was often...

More harmful than helpful. Who are we trying to comfort more? The afflicted? Or ourselves. If sympathy and compliments could cure cancer, we’d have never heard of it. It would have been eradicated in its malignant crib. It’s hard to look on at someone in such a state...

And do or say nothing, but often just acknowledging that the struggle is there and that it fucking sucks is enough

Be there for your friends with cancer. Especially if they ask you to. But if they keep their struggle silent, or private, let that be what it is: Their struggle. I get why Chadwick Boseman kept it private. That cancerous state isn’t how anyone wants to be remembered.

It’s painful at best and completely life destroying at its worst. It’s awful. I wish it never existed, but it does, and so must those who have it.