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Explaining My Terminal Illness to My Young Children
How do you tell your little ones that you’ve been given a year to live?
They knew from the moment my doctor called that something was wrong. My two sons, then aged one and four, had been sent to bed a little early so they wouldn’t bear witness to my terror. A routine MRI scan had revealed the worst: a 7-centimeter tumor in the frontal lobe of my brain. A week later, after my craniotomy, I got my formal diagnosis: glioblastoma multiforme, nicknamed “The Terminator.” My doctor told me it has a 100% recurrence rate over time. I was given a year to live.
There are so many difficult conversations to have when you find out you have a terminal illness, but none were so hard as telling my young children.
At first, my husband and I didn’t have the words to explain to them what was happening, because we didn’t know. It was like attempting to describe a hurricane from the eye of the storm. A parenting book given to us by a friend encouraged age-appropriate honesty with children of terminally ill patients. It argued that lying breaks the trust between a parent and child, and that if I died after telling them I wouldn’t, my children wouldn’t be able to find resolution or take advantage of the resilience that comes naturally to them. It made sense to us and suited our…
