Recently, I read a book chapter by Arthur Frank (2009) titled “The necessity and dangers of illness narratives, especially at the end of life”. It got me thinking.

One of the pet peeves among many cancer bloggers as well as those with metastatic breast cancer is cancer as a war metaphor – that is, the fighting a battle with cancer language. Many people don’t like suggestion that those who died from breast cancer “lost”, as if they did not try hard enough, as if breast cancer was something that involved winners and losers.

In the article Frank says that “narrative thinking embeds the idea that obstacles must be overcome for there to be a closure. Moreover, obstacles are necessarily understood as a personal test, conveying a sense of individual victory or defeat.”

If I look back on my experience, there was a time where I identified as a warrior. The metaphor worked. I was in chemotherapy and suffering from a variety of side effects. I needed to fight to keep exercising and do my best to keep strong. The war metaphor worked for me. It motivated me. In reflection, I see that it worked because I needed the sense of closure. I needed to know that the immediate experience I was having would end. To mentally make it through all the suckiness that was chemotherapy and then surgery recovery, I needed a sense of ending. So the war metaphor gave me a sense that there would be closure to that part of my life’s narrative.

But now, after acute treatment for early stage breast cancer, I feel that the war metaphor no longer works. It doesn’t work for my friends who are metastatic and will die from this disease. But it also doesn’t work for me. With survivorship, one of the things I am coming to terms with is that there is no sense of closure. There is no clear ending. The war metaphor no longer works for me. I’m living with all the side effects of treatment, and with all the fears of the cancer coming back, or another cancer happening. I do not expect that there will ever be that pretty closure that narratives seek. But I also think that is part of the point.

It got me thinking about why the war metaphor works for some people. With the war metaphor there is an a sense of ending, a sense of closure. But for most people with breast cancer, the only ending or sense of closure is death. It is not a narrative that is meant to have closure. The need for closure takes away an aspect of the experience that is paramount to those who are surviving after breast cancer treatment. You don’t know that you “survived” breast cancer until you die from something else. And those who do die from breast cancer, don’t lose a battle, they die. The sense of closure in the narrative is death. It doesn’t need to be a battle lost. It shouldn’t be a battle lost.