Terminal illness and isolation

What makes people shun a friend, or a member of their family, who has had some bad news?

If this should happen to you, you’re not alone. According to research carried out by a social networking app for cancer patients, ‘65% of respondents said that friends or relatives had disappeared or cut contact after their diagnosis’[i].

Another word used to describe this behaviour is ‘ghosting’. Merriam-Webster defines this as ‘the act or practice of abruptly cutting off all contact with someone (such as a former romantic partner) usually without explanation by no longer accepting or responding to phone calls, instant messages, etc.’

The presence of social media in our lives doesn't help matters. One respondent in the researchers’ survey shared:

Fourteen years ago, people weren't doing more than a quick call or text anyway, whereas now we're so attached to our phones and sharing everything on social media.” Another wrote, "I think because it's so much easier to be in constant contact, you're much more aware when people aren't.[ii]

The phenomenon is much more widespread than shunning people with cancer, devastating to the individual that it already is. People from different backgrounds, ages, and parts of the world wrote about their experiences in another popular social media app in response to this survey.

One person shared that family and friends would distance themselves from a family that just lost someone to suicide. Another experienced something similar when their daughter was born prematurely and subsequently diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Yet another noticed this with disability as it progressed and became more visible over time – particularly hard to understand as they still felt the same person internally. They found this experience bizarre and mystifying.

The consequences can be particularly hard to bear. One respondent’s home was always full of people for years until their mother was diagnosed with cancer. Another, who broke their back after a car accident, didn’t find it fun any more, because all of their friends stopped hanging out and returning messages.

This doesn’t just affect young people with friendships acquired recently. Respondents wrote that friends of 20 to 40 years standing did the same thing. For one, both parents died – and they found that everyone just stopped talking to them; including a best friend of 25 years standing.

The effects of this behaviour are often felt for a long time. Someone developed a chronic illness at 15 and all their friends left. They shared that it messed them up emotionally for years afterwards. Another shared that it’s hard to make new friends when you know they might disappear the moment the going gets tough.

Why would anyone inflict more misery on people who’ve had news that has turned their lives upside down and already left them hurting – when they feel vulnerable and low?

According to one respondent, a lot of people are just not ready to face illness and death. They explain that we as a culture fetishize being young and active as the only valid lifestyle. For them, it's easier to ditch a friendship, even a good one, just to not have to face your own fear of death, because many of us don't have the societal, familial, or even cultural ways to deal with it except to ignore it as long as possible.

For another, people just don't know how to handle it and don't want your suffering bringing them down or limiting their own life. And another believes it's just that they can't handle it emotionally and are doing it to protect themselves. For yet another, they're shutting you out because they don't want to see or think about what you're going through.

A cancer specialist shared their own experience on the same platform. People get a cancer diagnosis, they wrote, then their spouses divorce them and friends disappear. The specialist thought a lot about this and speculated it has to do with people's efforts to deny mortality. Most people, they concluded, deal with death by denial.

These thoughts shared by many people anonymously on social media platforms echo what Professor Ernest Becker wrote about in his 1973 best-seller and Pulitzer prize winner, The Denial of Death.

He wrote that the fear of annihilation is so basic, at such a bedrock of human existence, that the development of human character from early childhood is in itself an attempt to shield us from the unfolding of the true horror. “It can’t be overstressed … that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure self-confident activity impossible.” For him, indeed, “… the fear of death is natural and is present in everyone, that it is the basic fear that influences all others, a fear from which no-one is immune, no matter how disguised it may be.”

The fear of death need not be seen as inevitable, a baked-in component of what it means to be human. Overcoming this fear of death, or alternatively annihilation or judgement, is essential to make progress in our cultures and civilisations. According to the Baha’i Writings:

The conception of annihilation is a factor in human degradation, a cause of human debasement and lowliness ... the realization of existence and continuity has upraised man to sublimity of ideals, established the foundations of human progress and stimulated the development of heavenly virtues.

So what can we do if we find ourselves in a similar situation, either in the position of receiving bad news, or else perhaps reviewing our past actions in relation to someone we know?

First of all, it helps to put things into perspective. The overwhelming majority of respondents, on seeing the number of similar replies already present on this social media platform, wrote of their surprise and amazement that this phenomenon ‘is a thing’. It is so easy to believe that we are alone in seeing friends, family and contacts just ghost us and disappear, that for many it is a considerable relief to know that we are not on their own, painful though it is to still be in the situation.

Second, it may help too to understand a little of what may be going on in someone’s head when they act in the way that they do. Often subconsciously, and even if reasons given are something else on the surface, for example “I won’t say the right thing", "I'm too busy” or “I don’t like hospitals”.

And last, if you find yourself in the position of wondering what to do for someone you know, consider these words of advice from other contributors. Just call, or text, whatever you normally do. Do it every few days because illness is isolating and it helps to know people are thinking of you. Ask them how they’re doing.

For some people, it may help to agree to act as though nothing had happened. Talk about regular things like interests you share, suggest an activity like going for coffee, watching a show together, have them over for dinner. Do the kinds of things you normally would do with a friend. Just be present and let them know they matter to you.

The moral is, they write: it's okay to reach out. They're not going to kill you for not being in touch for a while. You will both be happier if you just talk to them.

[i] https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2020/02/9407894/cancer-and-friendship [ii] ibid