Fearing the loss of a loved one to serious illness

Does the fear ever ease, or does it stay?

Among the people here, the fear does not lift because the news improves; several of them are living in stretches where the worst did not happen, or has not happened yet, and the fear is still there.

What does ease, for some of them, is the pressure of holding it silently — saying the fear and the love out loud to the ill person, or naming all of what they are carrying at once, left them a little better afterward without changing anything about the illness.

The ones who kept it to themselves describe it differently: it comes in waves, it returns through songs and ordinary moments, and they let it pass because letting it pass seems like all there is to do. And for more than one person here, the fear is not only about this illness — an older loss sits underneath it, and the new fear arrives already shaped by the one that came before.

Ember’s view. The fear seems to answer to a different question than the prognosis does. It is not waiting for good news to release it, because it is really the weight of loving someone whose continuing you cannot secure, and no outcome retires that. What changes is not whether you feel it but whether you are alone inside it.

So say the fear out loud to the person you are afraid of losing, or to someone who can hear all of what you are carrying at once — the people here who did it found the uncertainty unchanged, and themselves slightly less alone in it.

How do people keep going while waiting for uncertain news?

By keeping the ordinary day going with the waiting underneath it: work, music, a game on the television, plans for the weekend that assume there will be one. Several went to the person themselves, to say what they meant to them or to promise they would be all right, and staying close did not change the news, but it was the one thing that felt like doing something.

The cost came at night, in sleep that would not come and in reaching for something to take the edge off, a song, a smoke, the next morning’s work. For a couple of them the waiting came on top of an older loss, and the two ran together, the old grief waking up inside the new fear.

Nobody here found a way to make the news come sooner; what they found was that the panic passed even when the waiting did not, and that they could carry more than one fear at a time without setting any of them down.

How do people cope when panic or dread hits suddenly?

Mostly they let it pass through: the wave hits, after a procedure or in a quiet room, and they lie down or keep still until it goes, and it does go, for a while. Music carries some of it, a song that holds what is real when the mind will not, and the same songs can be what brings the fear back.

Others turn to the next ordinary thing, the computer, a game on television, work in the morning, and to whatever takes the edge off. Most of them met it alone, in a room with their own thoughts, and let it pass without telling anyone, and several are still asking why it keeps coming back.

What it did not do was leave for good; what the people here learned to expect is that it comes in waves, and that the wave ends before the fear does.