ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the author’s experience of living life post-cancer and, more profoundly, after the death of her beloved son, John, to the same disease. Cancer and Complicated Grief as described in the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) are identified under the protected characteristic ‘disability’ by the UK Equality Act 2010 but their relationship with disability is complex. The chapter problematizes the pathologizing notion of ‘complicated grief’. Insider scholarship, which is in short supply, suggests that bereaved parents do not see their grief as complicated. More broadly, the chapter’s personal narrative disrupts the battle myth so often attached to cancer.
