For your obviously frustrated anons with compassion, here’s what helps me: a lot of people have no empathy, a lot of people lack the ability to see past their own needs and wants. Think about the online posts you see about some man demanding that their wife gets up really soon after childbirth to make them dinner or do laundry or sleep with him. Or think about when a couple might be going through a financially hard time and one person is the sole provider (let’s use the man in this scenario to keep things balanced) and the woman can’t understand why she can’t purchase her next designer bag and might have to wait until they’re on more stable ground. These types of people use the internet and are in this space. You can’t wait expect them to act differently than who they are online, particularly when protected by anonymity. You would think Catherine having cancer would have reminded them that she was a human being but it hasn’t. To them, she is supposed to be a puppet and a doll. Wear this, say this, attend this event so that I can entertain myself. And when she doesn’t, they take it as a personal offense. They can’t be helped unless they want to be and the first step to that is often self awareness. That or some people really feel a need to have a problem with absolutely anything they can get their hands on. Those are usually the kinds of people who if she had attended today would have complained about her hair or her dress or her slouch or the fact that she looked tired. They will drain the colour out of absolutely everything they set their sight on. That’s the other side of it.
P.S. I can also tell people who have never personally been touched by cancer or some other long-term, long-limiting illness. They’re the people who thought her remission news meant a reset button and not the start of another hill to climb for her.
This is so beautifully written (as everything you say is).
I think people, and I include myself in this, forget that prior to being diagnosed with cancer and undergoing treatment, she had a serious abdominal surgery significant enough that she was out of action for close to four months. That's insane. My mum had neck surgery a few years ago and her rest period was two months (and she's never fully recovered if we want to look at it as a whole). Plus, she must have been ill enough before hand to need the surgery and possibly even had cancer beforehand too, and who knows what impact that had on her.
