Of the emotional storms that Dr Doris Nyangoge Nyokangi was dealing with while undergoing lung cancer treatment, one was the exact time that her husband would remarry.
“One evening, I told my husband: ‘Baba Watoto, when I am gone, please consider getting married again so that you do not suffer from loneliness,” she writes in her book, “When Health Slips Away: A Twelve-Year Journey with Lung Cancer.”
Dr Nyokangi says as she reflected on her death, she remembered how her father had become physically and mentally drained when he was widowed in his 70s. He eventually drowned.
She did not want the same to happen to her husband, to whom she has been married since 1982 and has four children.
But she asked him not to remarry until their youngest daughter had finished university.
“I made this request because I wasn’t sure how she [my daughter] would react if my husband remarried while she was still young,” she says.
This happened in 2014.
At that time, Dr Nyokangi had undergone five cycles of chemotherapy and four sessions of radiation therapy. Her body was buckling under the weight of the medication. She had lost her appetite and had turned pale.
“I couldn’t bring myself to look in the mirror,” she recalls.
Besides asking her husband to remarry, she also wrote her own eulogy. Looking back, she believes this was the denial phase of her cancer fight. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer in October 2013. It was in stage two, discovered after a year’s tests, which could at first not pinpoint the exact cause of sharp pain in her abdomen.
After treatment, she was almost breathing a sigh of relief, but the cancer recurred in 2018. She had to face another round of chemotherapy.
Six years later, Dr Nyokangi is a woman on the mend. There is no evidence of disease in her lungs, and she is now out to educate the public on how to relate with cancer patients, learning from the ridicule she faced when her body changed due to chemotherapy.
Six years later, Dr Nyokangi is a woman on the mend. There is no evidence of disease in her lungs, and she is now out to educate the public on how to relate with cancer patients, learning from the ridicule she faced when her body changed due to chemotherapy.
“I stayed too long in denial, and that’s why I even wrote my eulogy because I knew I was dying. Later, when I accepted, I moved from denial. I was able to start being positive,” she talks of the need for Kenyans not to shy away from revealing that they have been diagnosed with cancer.
A Father’s plight
So, what did her father’s plight teach her about the need for widowers to remarry?
“After my mum died, he was not himself. He started talking to himself, pitying himself. He got confused. You know, he drowned. It’s very painful,” says Dr Nyokangi. “He could wake up at night, go wherever.”
One night, she says, he opened the door and left. It was after a search that he was found drowned in a river.
“That’s just because my mum died. He could not cope,” says Dr Nyokangi.
Her mother had died of pancreatic cancer. The widower status of her father converted him from a healthy man singing in a choir to a man living in his own world.
“I support men remarrying after the death of their wives. This is because it can be extremely difficult for them to cope with loneliness after losing their spouses,” Dr Nyokangi writes in her book.
In the book, Dr Nyokangi explains the place of support groups and the encouragement that one gets by interacting with other cancer warriors.
