IIllness is a great leveler. It’s about the rich and the poor, the famous and the invisible, about those who have the best treatment to offer and those who have none, and about everyone in between. It brings with it the reminder that the body is weak and that we are mortal. Time will run out.
King Charles is a unique symbol and someone who has had to live his entire life in public, but he is also just a man, an old man diagnosed with cancer. He is like no other, and like anyone who was born with nothing and will leave with nothing. And his sons, uniquely privileged men approaching middle age, are also damaged children and will remain children until their father dies and they step to the front lines – and one of them takes the throne. The painful spectacle of Harry rushing back to see King Charles for a short visit, and not even meeting his older brother, is a reminder of how a family can be the saddest and most unsafe place. The shadow of cancer exposes it, instead of healing it.
We like to think that serious diseases can have a transformative effect. Faced with an elemental threat, people can finally leave behind feuds and disagreements, the anger they have harbored, the wounds they have suffered and caused. They can see what is really important (love, as all the songs tell us; human connection) and come together, gather, do their part, care for the sick person and for each other. It happens. A crisis can bring out the best in people and force them to find new ways to be with their loved ones (hated ones). I know many families who have behaved with astonishing tenderness toward the vulnerable patient and toward each other. I know people who have dropped the rope and healed age-old bitterness.
But illness can have the opposite effect: cracks widen and old wounds open. It is frightening to watch a parent become ill, because no matter how old and vulnerable they have become, in our unconscious they remain figures of essential authority, the ones who created us, brought us into the world, cared for us and told us what to do. During their illness, we must be the adults, the caretakers, at a time when we return to the raw, scared feelings of childhood, small in the face of something that engulfs us. If our parents are mortal, so are we. When their time is running out, so is ours.
Some people put their normal lives aside to be with their mother or father during their illness; others cope with the disease by denying it. Some write hymns in their heads. Some start thinking about wills and inheritances. Some run away in fear; they cannot tolerate the hospital ward, the darkened room, the beeping machines. Some people seem indifferent. Some become irrational, others fiercely practical and competent. Some suffer from anticipatory grief. Siblings often argue or feel resentful, guilty, unrecognized, frustrated, overloaded, angry. The intricate web of connections is tense and torn.
Everyone copes in their own imperfect way, but a parent’s illness can be a root in a family’s deep, tangled past, where all the resentments, rivalries, feelings of being overlooked or undervalued live: our childish sense of life that simply does not exist honestly, and What about me? Family is one of life’s enduring great stories, full of drama, conflict, hidden secrets and daily tragedies. When King Lear abdicates at an old age, he relinquishes his authority and become majesty a ‘poor, bald, forked animal’, at the mercy of the world, thus sparking a war between his daughters. The play is about the end of the world, about a king learning to be a man, and it is also about the corrosive rivalry in a toxic family kept at a distance by the father’s rule. When that ends, the balance of power shifts and the precarious structure falls. A family is an infinitely complex system that functions more or less well. Disrupt the system and everything changes.
A grim battle for affirmation can take place around an ailing parent, like an inappropriate power grab, or like toddlers arguing. What about that time when he had more than me, or she hurt me and you didn’t protect me, or I was punished unfairly? Who has the most, who has the least? Who was the most loved? Who was seen the most? In this bleak zero-sum game, it feels like there is only so much love. What someone else gets is what I lose, and what I lose is what I wanted most, which was to be everything: the most loved, the most rewarded, the most recognized, the only one.
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The realization that time is running out can add great urgency to the bickering for a parent’s approval and love. Soon it may be too late to save the past. Harry’s attempt to stand by his father reads like a frantic attempt to gain forgiveness and love. The fact that he has not met William reads like an inexorable door closing. And even when a parent eventually dies (because Charles could of course live for decades, just like his mother and grandmother before him), the struggle is not over, for it is a struggle with self as well as with other .
The painful truth is that it is almost impossible to break away from the family you grew up with, no matter how harmful they may be to you or you to them. You can leave the country, choose not to see them, never talk about them, burn the photos, cut ties, think you’ve escaped and be free to be whoever you choose. But the formation of the self takes place in our earliest years, before memories are recorded, before words, within the family we are given. Our parents and our siblings exist outside of one’s personality and character, within our deep structure.
We are all children until our parents die, at which point we must become our own imperfect parent. It is disturbing to think that King Charles’ sons, who have experienced such trauma together, cannot turn to each other for comfort during this time of uncertainty. No one wins in a lonely fight like theirs.