If the Princess’s experience was anything like mine, then there is a very good chance that ever since she was diagnosed she will have struggled to feel any semblance of control, which for me as a control freak was hard to accept. When you are given a cancer diagnosis, you hand your fate over to doctors. You put your life in their hands and are powerless to do anything but follow their instructions. They steer the ship, they tell you what to do next, and you do everything they say. You endure treatments that make you feel dreadful, you undergo operations that terrify you (I had chemo and a bilateral mastectomy after my breast cancer diagnosis in 2022), you keep moving through the tunnel, trying to keep all your darkest fears at bay.
And then, one day, they tell you the news you have longed to hear. They say your treatment is over, that as far as they can tell you’re now cancer-free. And with that, they place your life back in your own hands. Quite suddenly, it feels, they send you back out into the world. It’s scary at first, but there is something so wonderful about going: “Okay, here I am, back in the driving seat.”
It’s frightening at first. You’ve been in this protected world. Then suddenly you feel like you’re on your own and back to wondering and self-diagnosing. “Off you go,” they say. “Come back if you notice any signs of cancer.” You feel you want more of a safety net. But hopefully you learn to live with that fear. For me it subsided much quicker than I’d expected, replaced with a newfound resilience. That old adage: “you could be run over by a bus tomorrow” never feels truer than after you have got to the end of cancer treatment.
What’s clear from the Princess’s video – in which she gently told the nation that she had completed her treatment and was now focusing on making her health her main focus – is that she has got to this point with her family by her side. And truly, if you are lucky enough to have family, it’s the only way you get through a diagnosis like that. When I was ill, my husband Graham and our four sons were on every step of that ride with me. One of my sons had to take me to hospital when I was lying on the bathroom floor being sick one day. When my hair fell out, he cheered me on as I paid for petrol for the first time without a wig or a hat on. He was only 17, but he was there for me in the most extraordinary, ordinary way. They all were.
Catherine and William’s children are younger than ours, but they will have helped their mother on her worst days just by being themselves and needing her to be their mum. They’re better than therapy, children – their lives go on while yours becomes about hospital appointments, and that is so helpful. It’s the carrying on of life that will, I’m sure, be vital to Catherine as she finds her feet post treatment.
It impacts everyone in the family though, there’s no doubt about that. People often feel the only one experiencing the cancer “journey” is the person with the diagnosis, but that’s not true. If you’re fortunate enough to have people in your life who love you then they go through it with you. The treatment isn’t the hardest bit, in a way. It’s how it makes everyone feel.
If William is anything like my husband then he will have instinctively known that the harder feelings he was going through needed to be shared with someone other than his wife. Watching someone you love suffer is hard, but if they can possibly manage it, the job of a spouse in these circumstances is to just be fine, to be that rock. Graham and I have never sat down and analysed what we went through. We haven’t really felt the need to. The tension and worry of that time simply subsided. We went through something terrifying, and then life went – as it does, so predictably – back to normal.
People often talk about how a cancer diagnosis can make or break a relationship. With ours, I know it’s meant that we are even more sure that we’ll be married for the rest of our lives. Not because it reignited some childlike, 18-year-old passion, it’s more that you really come to appreciate and feel grateful for what you have, and that brings a new joy into your relationship. When you’re faced with the possibility of it all being taken away, you realise how good you have it. Now, when he forgets to buy butter from the supermarket and I feel my blood pressure rising, I find myself thinking: “Actually, let’s not have an argument about this. Who cares?”
Through it all, the Princess’s main fears I suspect will have all surrounded her children. What if I don’t live to see them grow up? What if it’s hard for them to see me ill? What if I’m ruining their childhood and this affects them forever? However much she has endeavoured to protect them, it won’t have washed over them like water off a duck’s back (though children are more resilient than we give them credit for). But there is a very real chance that knowing she was ill and seeing her get better will have made them stronger. My mum died of cancer when I was 10. I lived in fear of ever getting cancer my whole life until the day when I heard those words. Strangely, coming out the other side of this has finally freed me of the overwhelming fear of the disease. George, Charlotte and Louis have learnt the scary truth that parents can get sick. But they also know they can get better. We get sick and then we – tragically not all, but most of us – get better. There is huge strength in knowing that.
Everyone is different, but for me it was so important to keep working through my cancer (and I suspect the Princess has been doing just that, behind the scenes), and then to simply get on with life once I physically could. I didn’t talk much about what I’d been through – not because I didn’t want to, I just found I genuinely moved on faster than people perhaps expected me to. I’d see someone six months on and they’d say: “Oh God, how are you?” I’d say: “Fine, why? Oh that! Oh yes, fine, thanks so much for asking.” That will be harder, I imagine, for the Princess. Time moves differently when you’re in the public eye. Over the past six months, the only thing the public has known about the Princess of Wales is that she has been ill. For her, there will have been many other highs and lows that will have filled those long weeks. Her year has not just been about cancer, it’s likely that it has been about lots of other things too.
It means that in the months to come, as she returns to public life, she will likely still have to answer questions about how she’s feeling. I feel for her hugely on that front. She may well want to put it all behind her.
What will be important will be to avoid coming into contact with judgement. Also not easy when you’re in the public eye. Today, if I post a picture of a small glass of rosé or me eating a chocolate bar on Instagram, someone will pipe up to tell me it’s bad for me and may bring my cancer back. Or when I swim in our pond, someone will let me know I shouldn’t be doing that because of the bugs in the water. The more she can block out the opinions of others and keep going on her own journey the better.
People often expect you to be “changed” in some way by cancer. I experienced physical changes, certainly, and it would be wrong to say it hasn’t left its mark emotionally. But I’m still me. I’ve gone back to worrying about all the things I used to worry about – the children, work, friends, whether or not everyone is healthy and happy.
Another shot in the video sees the Princess standing in a forest, surrounded by tall trees, feeling the sun on her face. It struck me, on seeing it, that there is such a reassuring inevitability to nature. It’s that great sense of growth and renewal you feel standing in a forest bursting with life.
When someone tells you you have cancer you think: “Oh my God, this could be it.” I can remember saying again and again to the doctors when they told me, “I can’t die.” They were telling me I wasn’t going to and I couldn’t hear it. Eventually I honed in on what they were saying and took it in. “Sarah,” they said again, “you’re not going to die.”
And I didn’t. And now life is going on, much as it always has. If I can be bold enough to offer our lovely Princess one piece of advice, it’s simply to keep going. This next bit may feel daunting, but she is the same remarkable person she ever was, and she can do this with her family by her side.
As told to Eleanor Steafel
