My husband shocked me with a comment I never expected to hear from him. We go to the Smoky Mts every year and until the past year and my health issues, we've always hiked to our favorite waterfalls to swim and picnic. I simply can't right now - my meds exhaust me. He mentioned a Hiking Club he joined online and about a hike they will be doing when we are there next month. I told him to go if he wants, I'll stay at the cabin and soak in the stream, read a book, rest. His comment, "I'd rather stay with you. I can always go with the club once you are gone!" OMG! I realize that we all have to face death - like they say, "None of us are getting out of here alive!" But my cancer is dying off, much to everyone 's surprise and I plan on many more years. Sigh. He seriously has no idea how that sounded! I haven't said anything to him about this. But GEEZ!
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Husband's Dumb Comments
Hi,
Was your husband joking when he said that? Not that it makes the comment any better, but perhaps he thought you would find his comment funny. I would have a chat with him and remind him that you have no plans to go anywhere anytime soon, not for many, many more years in fact!
Sophie
Yikes. No filter! I’m sure his intentions were loving,, but the delivery not well thought out. I think you need to clear the air after you’ve sat with this for a bit. I agree with Sophie, tell him he probably doesn’t realized how upsetting this was for you, and he better go on that hike cause he might not outlive you!🥴
I agree! I think after that comment my husband would definitely have to rethink outliving me and sleeping with one eye open!
It’s really amazing to me what people feel free to say to us. Would you ever? And I don’t mean just your husband. I think, as a politician would say, he misspoke. But this is a recurrent theme on this board. You really need a backbone and a sense of morbid humor to deal with other people’s issues in regards to our illness. Nothing normal about this new normal 🙀
Definitely say something about it to him. It shows that he is afraid. That he thinks about what he is going to do if you do die. We as Metastatic Breast cancer patients know that we can live many years with this disease. He on the other hand might be confused and afraid. My knee jerk reaction was to tell him he is an idiot but then I tried to see things from his perspective. I think you both need to sit down and discuss what this diagnosis means and how important it is for you to think life and ask him not to bring up death again. The good thing is that he wanted to stay with you. Next time if he says anything like that tell him
He better go because “I plan on living another 15 years and that’s an awful long time for him not to go hiking”
Did you ask how he'd found out about the divorce? Because that is the only way you'd be 'gone'? 😊
I had a similar thing happen with my husband when one evening he absently minded asked me if there was anything I particularly wanted to do before I died. My absent minded response was 'to find somewhere out of the way to hide the body of my husband and have lots of fun with my toy boy.'
I actually wish someone would ask me that! Instead it’s business as usual and I go to work come home and the days are boring and meaningless and all I can think is I want to do things just in case. Call me selfish but I want my husband to say what would you like to do or where would you like to go that’s fun? Money is tight but I still think we could do things that don’t cost a lot. I sometimes just feel that time is going so fast and I’m not enjoying living! Sorry just venting today. Feeling quite cranky.
It's not selfish at all! My coping mechanism is business as usual, though I rarely now do things I really don't want to unless they are very important to someone else.
What's stopping you from initiating the conversation?
If you think it might upset him, you could just make suggestions and talk about the need to spend time together doing things that are outside the house and making time for each other. All couples and families need that. Everyone needs to have fun, and us more than most!
If he doesn't want to do the things you suggest explain why you want to do them, just like you did above, and if he still objects go alone or find someone else to do them with. Life is too short for anyone not to enjoy living.
It is ok to feel cranky! Everyone does on occassion!
Hi, Julie2233! I can understand how you would find a question like this upsetting, but I don't think it's unreasonable. I ask myself the same thing every day, and I'm not planning to leave the planet anytime soon, either, but I also know I've been given a terminal cancer diagnosis and that my future is, at best, uncertain. I think it's sometimes hard to comprehend how our diagnosis affects others. I suppose he could have asked if there is anything you would like to do in the near future while you're still feeling well, (a question I also ask myself every day), but I'm not sure it would have made much difference. I would imagine that your husband was just trying to be helpful and supportive, and assumed that you think the same way about your cancer diagnosis as he does.
I think it's something that the majority of us with this diagnosis think about. Modern medicines mean we can live for much longer than those who were diagnosed 20years ago, but it still takes away the feeling that we are going to live forever. But that was a false belief anyway, no one knows what is going to happen to them tomorrow. We have the advantage in knowing that we have to live for the day and need to make the most of our time.
My husband is renound for his lack of sensitivity and empathy and he really struggles with my diagnosis. At the moment he is expecting me to die next year and is telling people that. He thinks that because his mother died from bc at the age of 52 and I will be 52 next year that's when I will die. His mother was actually 56 but I'm not telling him that as I don't want to go through this nonsense again! 😊
He did see the funny side of my response and it was actually a far gentler way of telling him that his question was upsetting and inappropriate rather than trying to explain it to him.
Well, that's good news and says a lot about your strength as a couple. No doubt, he was traumatized by his mother's passing and now feels he is facing the same situation with you. I'm sure it's unpleasant to have him telling everyone you know that you're going to die next year. You'll just have to keep on living and prove him wrong!
Thank you for sharing all of this. I wish you the best.
Thanks 😊 his family fell apart when his mum died, his father decided that his grief took priority and my husband and his sister, both young adults were expected to support him. My husband had been working abroad and his parents had decided not to tell him that his mother was ill. Back in the early 80s there was no real treatment and life expectancy was short. He found out a few weeks before his mum died. I met him a couple of years later. So I knew my news wouldn’t be taken well. But treatment has changed so much in the last 40 years. I’m not planning on going anywhere for a very long time 😊
Good for you! With all the new drugs out there, and others in the pipeline, I think we stand a good chance of lasting a while. It sounds like your husband had an experience with his mother's death that he will not forget this lifetime, so I'm sure your diagnosis only reactivated it.
I'm sorry that you're having to go through this. It's enough to have to deal with your own issues regarding all of this, which we all have to process, than to have to deal with your husband's issues on top of this. Hopefully, he provides valuable support in other ways.
Were all going to die one day , cancer or not.
Take his words with the sentiment behind them. He truly would rather be with you.
X
Hi I think we both have husbands that open their mouth before they engage their brain . I have had similar thoughtless comments but I’m not planning to go any where any time soon so he’s going to have to put up with me for sometime .
My husband and I just celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary. He is so upset about my diagnosis and can’t bear the thought of losing me. He’s been looking online at little travel trailers for when I’m gone. This doesn’t upset me at all. I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon, but I think they try to wrap their head around the fact that they need to accept what will happen. Please try not to take it personal. Mine thinks I’m going to die in two weeks because I’m Stage IV. I try to tell him it’s not like it used to be. I think your husband is trying to convince himself he’ll be okay.
Oh dear! Glad you talked to him
I think it was his fear speaking. He may not be able to tell you that he is worried about you dying even though you are getting better. What he blurted out was his way of showing his fear. It hurts though. Sweet that he wanted to stay with you. I think he loves you lots💞💞
I think that you do have to speak to him about his comment and get it out in the open otherwise you will keep replaying it in your head.
I think there is no doubt that your husband loves you very much.
His remark shows the other side of this disease....the fear of the people who love us. It's stage 4 cancer....which is synonymous to fear And uncertainty, for us and for them. I have had friends distance themselves from me because THEY are scared that this stage 4 may kill me any day now and they don't know how to interact with me. I have friends and family who contact me every single day to check if I'm not getting "worse". We do it too! I've seen posts on here with questions about longevity full of fear. I myself wonder sometimes how long I'll be around; especially during the miserable week off Ibrance when I feel like sh.., physically and mentally. Then two weeks later I'm totally hopeful I'll be living to see grandkids.
Your husband's remark shows love and fear...nothing else. We cannot mistake his fear for insensitivity.
My dark sense of humor has been a huge help in coping with this "terminal" cancer! Still is, after 15 years living with mbc, and not just for me but my family as well. I think I am very fortunate to have grown up in a family that dealt directly with death. My mother had lost her sister and her mother when she was just 18 and her father died a few years later, before my parents met. I grew up knowing who my brothers and I would live with if both our parents died, and that their boys would live with us if their parents both died. I found it comforting to know. We regularly visited my uncles grave in a huge military cemetary and when we visited our father's parents, we often walked to a big park nearby and sometimes walked in the old graveyard there. I often sought out the headstone of a small girl who had died, and sat by her grave and talked to her. I remember having a funeral of sorts when my pet white rat died, and burying him right behind our house. When my mother had lung cancer, and a very limited amout of time left, she wanted to watch comedies about death! I remember watching Harold and Maude and the Loved One with her. My little brother died at 17 in a car crash and my family donated his organs--very very early in the time that was even possible. It gave me and my dad some comfort to do that and though it didn't comfort my mom or brother at all, they both thought it was the right thing to do, to find a way to help somebody else. I wrote a will for the first time in my early twenties and a durable power of attorney for health care at the same time. I've updated both several times but my family's attitude was always that it was important to take care of this kind of business---and greatly easier emotionally when death seems a long way off rather than lurking in the corners. My husband and I had only been married for two years when I got this diagnosis. His parents had died several months after our wedding and we bought burial plots in the very old and very beautiful local cemetary next to theirs at the same time we got their plots. He had a part time job at a long time family friend's paint and flooring store and has joked that we should put our ashes together in a paint can and put the can on the paint shaker to mix them all together. I happen to think that is very funny and now we joke that we'd like some of our dogs' and cats' cremated remains added to the mix. The only really yucky thing anybody has said to me about this lousy breast cancer was an older man that I thought of as a kind, warm and supportive guy who asked me "which one?" I went blank when he said that and have no idea what I said or if I said anything. I have learned alot about how varioius people handle something like this but I've not found any of it offensive, just rather interesting and more about them than about me. But here I am 15 years older (73), older than anyone in my mother's immediate family, but younger than those in my father's family, younger by far as my grandmother, who'd had endometrial cancer in her 70s in the 1950s, lived to be almost 102. I'm able to joke about the cancer and about death. I'm ready for it when it comes but I hope it is awhile yet, as in several years awhile. And I feel very fortunate to have lived this long with mbc and to have been raised to be direct about dealing with illness and possible death.
I have a dark sense of humor too, it gets you through alot, as does laughter about it. My life started out going to funerals, as at 5 years old my grandfather who I called daddy, light of my life, passed away and back then they took pictures of them in their coffins, some still do. But anyway, at 4 or 5 I found the pictures and would have his funeral all over again in our living room, playing the song they played at his funeral on my phonograph. I was really a little "Wednesday Addams" sort of girl LOL
That’s hilarious in a macabre sort of way!
I love horror movies (not the stupid gory rubbish) and they’re about death and so forth but when real death in the real world raises its ugly head...I can’t find any humour...my sister was killed in a road accident when she was 16 and I was 6....I wasn’t told much and was bewildered and scared...the thought of funerals etc fills me with dread...I avoid them at all costs..unless I have to!!
Strange aren’t we?..yet I love reading crime/murder/thrillers etc....but they’re not real life
Barb xx
I know what you mean, I feel like I've met my funeral quota for life, as I don't remember having a choice when I was little. Six months after my grandfather died, my uncle/brother died at 18 in a car wreck. They hit a tree and he bled to death, his fellow passenger got scared and ran instead of calling an ambulance or he would have lived, my grandma never got over that. I had his pictures in the coffin too. I think it was my way of digesting it but still, those pics shouldn't have been accessible to me but maybe my grandma thought she was helping me deal with it to expose me to it and not let it become a scary memory, but something I could look at again and again. I'm so sorry you lost your sis! <3 xo
WOW! I think it's the "stage 4" thing that for so long has meant imminent death to those not dealing with our specific diagnosis. Maybe they should make a stage 3.9. People hear stage 4 and automatically think we will be exiting this life very soon. Husbands, in particular, my husband, has handled this by focusing on his own health needs and just for July he has 4 dr. appts! I, on the other hand, still detest going to the doctor, so some things never change. I'm trying to think where I'm going with this and I guess it's just that our husbands handle stress so differently. I know mine loves me, and he would die for me if it came to that, but he sure has gotten mean when just having simple conversations, he bites my head off before I'm even done saying my bit. I know it's the stress but that doesn't make it any easier, my defenses go up and then I feel like the martyr, "how dare he treat me this way when I'm dying". This emotional roller coaster stinks to high heaven. Back to your post, I think in his own mannish way he was proclaiming his great love for you over hiking, and like a man, had to end it with a macho finish coz it got too mushy. God bless you and heal us all in Jesus name, amen!
Yes, stage 3.9!!! Lol
This just shows us once again the power of words and don't even get me started on the mind! LOL
Yes, our minds....it consists of emotions and expectations that are just different from person to person and sometimes have little rationale.
Jesus !!! I would have said unless you go before me darling xx
For some reason if my husband said that to me I don't think it would bother me. I make comments about myself like that sometimes. Maybe it's just a difference in personality.
I hope he didn't realize what he said!!
Maybe he was attempting "gallows humor." I can tell you that my wife and I engage in this humor occasionally now. The other day, we were out driving me to the library. She hates the traffic around that area and was grousing about it. I said, "Just think. When I'm gone you won't ever have to go to the library again." She countered with, "The way I drive, you might be going sooner rather than later." We both laughed. I think humor masks a lot of emotions. One day, my wife said, "Maybe we should just be like Thelma and Louise and find a cliff. Then we could go together." She was trying to be funny but our laughter turned to tears. She admitted that she couldn't stand thinking about being without me. I suppose everything depends on your husband's personality, etc. This whole cancer thing is so hard. When I first read that my time to live, according to actuarial facts, was 22 months, I was shocked. And then, I started going to a therapy group. There are 2 women in my group with the exact same cancer as mine who have had it for over a decade. So, everything is constantly up in the air. We live with this sword of Damocles over our heads every day. If I were you, I'd bring the subject up at a time when you are both calm and tell him that it hurt my feelings. See what he says.
Yea i think i would have felt the same way. I really hope he didn't realize what he said and how it made you feel. I would definitely say something to him. Men sometimes handle things so differently.
Greetings :Sister, and yessssss warrior. Men traditionally are taught to be lesssssss emotional, and they don't like to show or express emotion. Also a lot of men don't have a discretion filter on their mouths. Remember we are the smarter, and stronger sex, thank God for our strengths, even though we may lack physical body strength where we might have to work out harder to stay in shape. I respect, and love the sensitive, strong, intelligent great men in my life, but they would not be able to handle painful/difficult monthly's. They can not grow another human being within their bodies, or deliver a child in hours of unimaginable pain. If the men closest to us in our lives utter something that sounds stupid, it may sound like common sense to them, or maybe on a few of those occasions they may think, did I really say that out loud. We men, and women, have all been there, and said things that we wish we could take back. This is when we have to be mature enough to say I am sorry. So if I have offended any of our brothers out there. I am sorry. No one is perfect except God. XoXoXoXoXoXoXoXo
FYI my daughter in laws are the ones who make the rude comments.
So many men...so few bullets. :-\
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