The secret burden of holding the family together when your wife has cancer

Accept the limits of your power

The charity Macmillan Cancer Support underlines the importance of not ignoring your own feelings at a time when the natural instinct is to focus everything on your partner. “It is not good for you to ignore your feelings for a long time. You should try to take care of yourself during this stressful time. Paying attention to your feelings is an important part of this. It can help you support the person with cancer,” the charity advises.

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An added challenge is that some men (and women) see themselves as fixers, or think they are experts at applying logic and process to problems in life, but an illness such as cancer throws a spanner into that. Prince William is both personally resourceful and has bountiful resources, but he cannot influence everything.

“Those sorts of people struggle most as they find themselves in a situation they cannot fix, which causes anxiety,” Sieger says. The advice is to instead “fix the way you look at it” and try to accept the limits of your power.

One woman who recovered from cancer said her husband felt “almost jealous sometimes because the patient gets all this attention and sympathy and can just scream or cry or collapse or whatever, but the partner has to just keep everything together and not be grumpy”.

Men have traditionally been worse at discussing their mental health than women, but when stoicism is gilded by an extra sense of necessary selflessness, it’s easy to feel as if you must simply shut up and put up.

Keep daily chores running

The 11 feelings that people commonly feel when a loved one is diagnosed with cancer, according to Macmillan Cancer Support, include the following: shock, fear, anxiety and uncertainty, denial, grief and loss, sadness, anger, resentment, guilt, loneliness, and tiredness and exhaustion. “People can get frightened, and frustrated, when their partner is going through this,” Sieger says. In Prince William’s case, “he might have a sense of ‘Why me?’ given he also lost his mother at a young age, so he may fear loss and abandonment, and on top of that his father is also ill”.

The struggle to keep ordinary day-to-day chores running is often toughest. One man whose wife went through treatment for breast cancer while their two young children were at school recalls trepidation at heading to the school gates, where he’d be “surrounded by sympathy and well-meaning questions” but felt the urge to get away as soon as possible.

Another remedied this particular awkwardness by wearing large headphones on the school run, rather than come up with a response to the non-specific “What can we do to help?”

Find space to recharge

But Sieger says that rather than fending off all well-wishers, it can be useful to work out exactly how friends and family could help with the domestic load. Though, as that same husband points out, “it’s not that helpful to have tearful relatives around”.

He adds that another challenge was having to learn how to cook “pretty damn quick”. His wife previously did the cooking but was unable to do so during her chemotherapy treatment.

“The calls for food would come at any time – my wife wouldn’t have eaten for days through sickness, then would suddenly fancy lamb cutlets and mashed potatoes.”

Ultimately, for any spouse shouldering this, the key, says Sieger, is not to put too much pressure on yourself. “Slowing down is difficult for some people. There is pride, fear, and people like to use battle language: ‘We cannot let this beat us’. But you have to carry on with hobbies, or meeting friends, or finding space for yourself. You need to recharge mentally, however you can.”

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“Life shrinks a bit,” adds one man who has been where Prince William is. “But that’s no bad thing.”

The Telegraph, London

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