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It’s a unique role to be someone witnessing a loved one struggle with disease.

You cannot possibly expect to know what they are feeling or what the experience is like if you haven’t been through it yourself. And finding the right words never seems possible. It probably wouldn’t take away their fear or anxiety anyway. And the crystal ball that you wish you had, the one that will be able to confirm that everything WILL be alright...it just doesn't exist.

And the disease, let's say cancer, is random and as violent as any criminal out there. Except that criminals can be traced and apprehended and once they have committed their crime they usually leave the scene. Disease, cancer, lives inside and you walk around with it every single moment. You cannot escape from it. Even the things that are supposed to help you often make you feel worse than you could ever imagine feeling, worse than the disease itself. And the treatments involve not only taking things away from you psychologically or emotionally but also physically. Changing your body and making you feel completely ravaged and maimed.

And you try to imagine that feeling of knowing that you will never again be the person you were before, even when you can say "I survived". Imagine that it is like a bad dream from which you cannot seem to rouse yourself. Imagine that you believe in survival and in fighting but you don’t believe that things will ever be the same again or that the fear will ever truly go away. Imagine that the monster in the closet has reappeared from your childhood except it is more ghoulish and grotesque and real than you could have ever imagined.

Watching this happen, knowing that there is absolutely nothing that you can do to make it better…how do you do that? How do the kids and partner and parents and family and friends, the people with whom there is love and history and future chase a little of the uncertainty and the pain away? Surely we all would take a little piece of the disease and each share in the struggle, the hurt, the pain. But that’s impossible because it is a lonely and solitary struggle even in the midst of all the love and all the support in the world. And as a witness you already know that…no matter how you react or how you handle it, you already know there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can do.

So you choose to listen or just be there. Try to act as normal as possible in the face of something completely abnormal and scary. And hope that when the time comes to do something that does make a difference you recognize it and fulfill the role to which you have been assigned.

And you accept that is all you can do.