My husband was diagnosed with a mass on his pancreas on a clear and cold January day in 2023, right after his 59th birthday. I remember when he called me on the way home from the hospital. “They found a mass on my pancreas,” he said. There is no amount of anxiety that can prepare you for the moment when your spouse is diagnosed with cancer.
As someone who just relived this painful experience, along with my mother’s dementia diagnosis, in writing a forthcoming book, How to Lose Your Mother, the whiplash-inducing Joe Biden news cycle of the past several days has hit differently. After days of details spilling out of Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book chronicling the “cover-up” of Biden’s “decline” during the 2024 election cycle, the former president’s office shared the news Sunday that he had been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones.
With a Gleason score of 9 out of 10, Biden’s cancer “represents a more aggressive form of the disease,” his office said in its statement. Still, “the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive, which allows for effective management,” according to the statement, and “the president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.” In a social media post, Biden wrote that “cancer touches us all,” adding, “Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places.”
One of the things that happens when you become a “cancer family” is that you start doing math. The Bidens, of course, were already a cancer family; the former president’s eldest son, Beau, died of cancer in 2015 at age 46. What I noticed is how life becomes a series of binaries, no longer a world of multiple choices. For instance, you’ll undergo surgery or you won’t. My husband had two surgeries, both of which were wildly successful. As for treatments, you’ll start with one, and if it works, like it did with my husband, you won’t have to go any further. In some cases, though, you’ll go from treatment to treatment until you’ve exhausted all your options.
So much of American life is grappling with a nearly endless series of choices. With cancer, there are protocols. You will do one, then another, then another. Sometimes the doctors are optimistic, but often they will be extremely careful with future predictions. They will speak in generalities, they will offer possibilities; if the patient responds well to X, then we can move to Y. But you will be very aware that when it comes to cancer, there are still many, many unknowns. Bodies are different; a treatment works on one person and not another.
My husband was a couple decades younger than the 82-year-old Biden when he was diagnosed, though they discovered the tumor in a scarier place. His pancreatic cancer, thankfully, turned out to be slow-moving, making it more treatable. So much of cancer survival just boils down to the mechanics of how fast your cancer moves or spreads. A slow-moving cancer can coexist in your body for years, even decades; a fast-moving cancer can kill you in weeks or months. As a cancer family, we started doing the math—like trying to determine how long my husband might have, what different treatments would mean for our family’s quality of life. I have teenage kids, so the math of my life was different than that of the Bidens’, but the math of how one’s husband’s illness ripples through the family is the same.
Except Biden’s illness goes beyond his family and ripples through the world. Our family struggled with deciding whom to tell what and when. For the Bidens, this question must have taken on far more magnitude. The former president is in a totally different position than most people in the world. When my husband got sick, we didn’t worry about any political implications of his illness, nor how it might reflect on the Democratic Party as it reckons with defeat in 2024 and plots a way forward. We didn’t have to worry about the president’s son suggesting a “cover-up” or mockery from the MAGA crowd.
Also, my husband never got all that sick. He was able to work almost every day, and because his work involved investing in education, he was deeply motivated by the opportunities that his companies created for the disenfranchised. He found that his cancer gave new meaning to his work and the importance of it. He asked himself if he had months, weeks, days, would he keep going to work? What would his legacy be?
One of the few positive aspects of becoming a cancer family is that you get really connected to your humanity and the humanity of the people around you. Cancer is nonpartisan. Cancer doesn’t care whom you voted for or how much money you made or have. I don’t know what happens next for Biden, but for our family, my husband’s diagnosis created even more meaning in his life. His work became even more important to him. I hope that for the Bidens, this cancer diagnosis can help secure more meaning in his life and get all of us focused, for a moment, on our shared humanity, rather than partisan differences.
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The post Joe Biden’s Diagnosis Is a Sad Fact of American Life. I Know Because I Have a “Cancer Family.” appeared first on Vanity Fair.
