I’d spent the morning toggling between my day job and addressing what we knew would be my mother’s last Christmas cards. But I had just enough time to bake a celebratory spice cake from a box – it might cheer us all up, I thought – before the pastor came for an afternoon visit. While I mixed ingredients, my husband texted photos of open cabinets. Did we need this cable? Could we toss out this folder? I typed back one-word responses with sticky fingers; one eye was glancing at the clock, the other peeking in anxiously on my mother, my throat filling with guilt as I pictured my husband, stranded, besieged by piles of dusty junk and cardboard boxes.
The cake smelled heavenly, of ginger and allspice. But did you know that you can’t make buttercream frosting with butter that’s still cold? Reader, I did not. And when my lumpy frosting mixture violently tore off the top of my birthday cake, just minutes before I had to get the kitchen (and my mom) ready for company, I lost it. I dug my fingers into the pan and hurled cake into the trash by the fistful. Later, after the pastor left, I stood over the sink, picking crumbs out from under my fingernails and sobbing.
As you can imagine, in the years since, I have seldom watched movies or TV shows about cancer on purpose. The feelings of overwhelm and helplessness come back all too easily, spoiling evenings I mean to spend relaxing.
The wonderfully funny Dying for Sex, though, was worth breaking my own rule for.
Based on the award-winning podcast of the same name, the show stars Michelle Williams as Molly, a woman who’s diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and vows to spend her final months reaching new dimensions of sexual pleasure. Molly abruptly leaves the husband who looked after her during an earlier bout with breast cancer and has since treated her as more of a patient than a wife. Instead, she puts her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), in charge of her care.
In the grand canon of TV cancer storylines, caregivers’ hardships are often acknowledged only in passing. In The Big C, Paul Jamison cracking under the pressure of caring for his cancer-patient wife and providing for his family is a subplot in one season of the show’s four. Adam Braverman on Parenthood seemed to be able to do it all while his wife underwent chemo. Smith Jerrod shaved his head in solidarity – and that was pretty much the extent of his memorable contributions to Samantha Jones’s cancer arc on Sex and the City. By contrast, Dying for Sex makes the rare choice to centre Nikki’s experience as a cancer caregiver alongside Molly’s experience as a cancer patient. With startling honesty, it portrays the punishing toll cancer care can inflict, even on those who find joy and meaning in providing it.
At the beginning of Dying for Sex, Nikki, an actor, enjoys a blossoming career and a promising new relationship. “She’s hyper-creative, forcefully loving, self-centred but not because she’s selfish,” Slate says. “She’s always there for Molly, but she’s living for herself.”
But as Nikki finds her stride as Molly’s caregiver (slash facilitator of many of Molly’s sex-capades), her subsequent sacrifices are numerous – and largely involuntary. First, she finds herself constantly harried as she tries and fails to juggle Molly’s medical appointments and her own rehearsals. A romantic encounter between Nikki and her boyfriend is abruptly derailed when Molly’s insurance ends her hours-long hold on the phone. Nikki gets fired from her role in a Shakespeare production. Her relationship disintegrates after her boyfriend forces her to take a day-long break from Molly’s care. Forced out of their shared place and without income to rent an apartment, Nikki moves in at Molly’s, turning her around-the-clock caregiving from metaphorical to literal.
Nikki has some cake-in-the-garbage moments of her own: Molly spontaneously ditches Nikki’s carefully made plans for a hospital New Year’s Eve, leaving Nikki alone in a patient room full of decorations and balloons, silently confronting how much her constant, unwavering support has cost her. In another scene, as Nikki rushes to get Molly’s sex toys to her at the hospital with just hours left for Molly to achieve her most cherished sexual goal, Nikki discovers her car’s being towed, leaving her stranded in the pouring rain. As a bus bearing an ad for the play that fired her – now in its sixth extension – rolls by, Nikki tearfully admits she needs help herself.
“I really wanted to find a way to show how drained she is, but how she keeps calling into the strength of her commitment,” Slate says. “This is a woman who’s being really, really, really depleted and calling into an energy reserve that’s really only there in extreme situations, like the mom who lifts the car because her baby’s under it.”
New York’s Red Door Community, formerly known as Gilda’s Club, provides free social and emotional support to cancer patients and their loved ones. And as Migdalia Torres, its executive director of program, explains, the community Red Door serves includes a lot of caregivers whose experiences look like Nikki’s.
Caregivers’ experiences can vary, of course. But commonly, Torres says, it has physical and emotional consequences similar to chronic stress. Caregivers often struggle with hypervigilance or a sense of being unable to let one’s guard down even for a short time: “If you make a mistake, if you get this wrong, if you don’t understand this, if you don’t help make the right decision, it can have catastrophic outcomes,” Torres says. “Literally, it’s life and death, right? You’re never resting.” (As Nikki shouts at her boyfriend after he forces her to take a break from Molly duties, “I don’t get a day off. I don’t want a day off.”)
Additionally, caregivers often find themselves disadvantaged at work, as well as financially strained from medical costs. And many are so busy being the support that they don’t seek support of their own. “From the outside, there can be this perception that if you love someone, you care for them. You put on your boots and do what you need to do,” Torres says. “But I think caregivers know that people will never truly understand what the price is. How much they sacrifice, how much they lose.”
Sheila Langan, a clinical social worker at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a co-leader of its caregiving committee, calls Slate’s portrayal of Nikki “important”.
“Nikki’s character really speaks to the complex emotional experience of being a caregiver. So many share feelings of overwhelm, love, determination, guilt, anger, helplessness over not being able to make someone better,” Langan says, “and anticipatory grief, which is the experience of grieving someone even as they’re still alive.” Nikki also reflects a lot of what Langan hears from young adult caregivers. The gigantic responsibility lands in their laps “at a time where they’re just starting to figure out their life, their career, their relationships. So they don’t have a lot of stability,” Langan says. “Or they feel like they need to put their life on pause, as Nikki does.”
Langan also commended the show’s portrayal of caregiver burnout, or the exhaustion that can come from a long-term stint in such a logistically and emotionally demanding role. It’s an uncomfortable thing for a lot of primary caregivers to talk about: “They see the person they’re supporting going through so much, so they might feel the need to protect them from their own feelings,” Langan says, “or feel like their emotions aren’t valid because they’re not the one who’s sick.”
Dying for Sex, though, seems to be extending an invitation to start talking about it. In the days since it premiered, Slate says she’s heard from a number of current and former caretakers who have seen themselves in Nikki.
“Not since the movie Obvious Child have I done something where so many people bring me their experiences,” Slate says. The caregiver experience is one of fortitude and heartbreak, the joy of sharing a unique kind of intimacy with someone you love and the anguish of shouldering the consequences. Playing all of it, Slate says, was “so beautiful. It’s like being allowed to play all the instruments in a symphony.”
