Stop all the speculation. Catherine, Princess of Wales—Kate to those (many millions of people) who love her—has cancer. Not a body double, or a mental illness, or a marriage crisis (even by social media’s feeding frenzy standards, there have been some morally degenerate low blows), but cancer. Nobody knows where, or how far advanced—and nor should they—but it is serious enough for her to have been prescribed a “preventative” course of chemotherapy. This corrosive treatment—as those like me, who have had the misfortune to endure its toxic blasts will know—is not for the faint-hearted.
As I watched Kate’s brave announcement yesterday afternoon, I realized that I was barely breathing. Sitting on a bench in the muted spring sunshine, choked with repressed emotion, a frightened 42-year-old mother of three young children had to tell the world what she will still barely be able to comprehend herself; that her life, be it to a greater or lesser degree, is under threat.
It is almost exactly eight years since I had to make the same announcement. But I only had to make it to my family and friends. Nobody would have screenshotted the image of me and zoomed in to see if my long, dark hair was starting to fall out. I didn’t have to politely ask anyone for privacy.
Kate with Prince Louis, Princess Charlotte, and Prince George in 2022.
Photo: Getty Images
But I did—and here is where tears of empathy for the Princess rushed into my eyes—have to tell the three little people, whose lives mine was the absolute axis of, what no child should ever have to hear. “On the outside, I am nodding my head and asking endless practical questions,” I wrote in the diary of my shock breast cancer diagnosis, aged 39, that Vogue published in May 2017. “But on the inside, I’m screaming. My surgery to remove the tumor is scheduled for 10 February. My children’s half term. And that’s when the tears come. My children. My children…”
At the time, my children were 10, seven and three. George, Charlotte, and Louis Wales are 10, eight, and five. I will never, as long as I live, forget the moment that my husband and I had to line them up on the sofa—sensing it was serious, there was none of their usual jostling and blabbering and asking for food—and tell them that Mummy had cancer.
Before breaking the news, I had sought advice from the psychotherapist Julia Samuel—a friend of the family and founder, patron, and trustee of Child Bereavement UK—on how best to proceed. Julia is wonderful, kind, and immensely knowledgeable. She also happens to have been Catherine’s late mother-in-law, Diana’s, best friend. Almost more than anything, I hope that Julia has imparted the same advice to Catherine as she did to me.
Practically, she said, the language should be simple. Bad news and good news. The bad news? Mummy has cancer. The good news? That it has been found and the doctors know exactly how to treat it. “OK, right,” I said. “So I’ll tell them I have cancer, and then I will promise them that I’m not going to die?” And here is where the bomb dropped. “You can’t tell them that, Chloe,” Julia said, gently. “Because that is a promise you might break.”
“Are you going to die?” squeaked my seven-year-old daughter, while her 10-year-old brother hid his head in his hands and their three-year-old sister rushed off to get her doctor’s bag. And all I could do was hold her tight and tell her that, of all the cancers I could have got, mine was one of the easiest to fix.
Nobody knows the details of Kate’s cancer or her prognosis. But I, and many others like me, know the shock and the pain and the fear that she must be experiencing. We know, firsthand, the full horror of what the next few months will hold. She may lose her hair, her vivacity, sometimes even her sense of herself. She will feel sick, poisoned, and bone tired. She could be plunged into early menopause, her brain could fog like a dark winter’s night, her mouth could be full of ulcers, her fingernails may even fall out.
But—and here is where I wish, more than anything, that I could talk to her—there will be extraordinary, I would even argue life-changing, silver linings. One day, all being well, she will look back, as I do now, and see all the gifts that cancer gave me. A profound love, and gratitude, for those people—and I will always know who they are—who really, unwaveringly, walked beside me through those dark days. A wonder in the astonishing beauty of the world. An appreciation of the everyday. A sharpening of focus. A real and genuine sense of what truly matters in this life.
The truth is simple, and it’s the same whether you’re royal or not. What matters is being healthy. What matters is loving and being loved. What matters is living every day of the life you’ve been lucky enough to be given as best, and as positively, as you can. And if, as a mother, you can teach your children that… well, then that is worth enduring anything for.
Chloe Fox is an author and the host of the Late Fragments podcast. You can find her @chlofox on X and Instagram
