Cancer was once unmentionable. But for the Princess of Wales, the new requirement for openness risks turning into ugly curiosity
It may be that privacy has always been a relative concept, but in an age when its gradations grow ever crazier, their management left almost entirely to the harried individual, some of us find ourselves longing for its old, more absolutist protections: for the silence of our grandparents; for the laconicism of our parents. On Friday, like so many other people, I watched a youngish woman – a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife – talk about the illness for which she’s being treated, and in the midst of my sympathy, an alarm began to ring somewhere in my head.
Across the internet, I knew, people would be busy deleting their stupid, spiteful Facebook posts; in the cause of personal damage limitation, a few would shortly board Instagram in order to loud hail an apology – red-face emoji – for their part in the spiralling gossip and loopy conspiracy theories. And yet, I also knew her carefully beseeching statement wouldn’t really draw a line under anything. The word cancer is a beginning, not an end. Around the Princess of Wales, expectations are already quietly blooming, like the daffodils we saw behind her as she spoke.
