Nearly six years after Chadwick Boseman’s death, his widow, Simone Ledward Boseman, is sharing new details about his colon cancer journey.
When the actor passed away at the age of 43 in August 2020, many people were shocked to hear that he even had cancer. In an interview with TODAY’s Craig Melvin aired March 20, Ledward Boseman said the diagnosis also came as a surprise to her and her husband.
“I didn’t know that he was experiencing anything until he had already been to the doctor twice. It all seemed to come about very suddenly. It was a matter of weeks that he started not feeling well,” she said.
Ledward Boseman said colon cancer is “really tricky in that way.”
“And because he was so young, he wasn’t even at the point where he would consider having a colonoscopy,” she added.
It was 2016 when the “Black Panther” star learned that he had Stage 3 colon cancer. To this day, Ledward Boseman is unsure if the disease ran in her husband’s family.
“I still don’t know his family history,” she said, adding that a lot of people find themselves in a similar situation.
According to the Mayo Clinic, the symptoms of colon cancer can include but are not limited to a change in bowel habits, blood in the stool or rectal bleeding, ongoing discomfort (gas, pain or cramps) in the stomach, unexplained weight loss and more.
After Chadwick Boseman’s diagnosis, he and his wife were “very confident” that he “would make it through,” she recalled.
“To us, it was going be a challenging moment, but something that he would come out on the other side of and be fine. And they would do a surgery, and he would do some chemo afterward, and he would be OK. And there wasn’t much talk at all of the possibility of him not being OK on the other side of that,” she said.
Ledward Boseman said thinking about the possibility of her husband not surviving felt “like a betrayal of faith.”
“There are a lot of moments where I look back on that time and wish that we had been able to find a way to talk about that,” she said.
Ledward Boseman noted that her husband was briefly cancer-free in 2018, describing that period as “a beautiful year.” But by the end of that year, the actor’s cancer had returned as Stage 4.
Chadwick Boseman opted to keep his cancer journey private. While speaking with Craig, Ledward Boseman explained why this was important to her husband.
“Chad was not a person that would have wanted to be treated any differently because people knew that he was sick,” she said.
The actor continued to work throughout treatment.
“The work is what was keeping him moving, so he didn’t want the work to suffer just because he was sick. He didn’t want to be handled with kid gloves because people thought he wasn’t going to be able to do his job and slide underneath falling cabinets and run across fields,” Ledward Boseman said.
When Craig asked if grieving gets easier over time, she reflected on how she feels almost six years later.
“The edges get less sharp, I think, is the best way to put it,” Ledward Boseman said. “There are still edges and there are still a lot of painful moments. But I think it becomes easier to find the love in those moments, as well. You become more accustomed to carrying the weight of grief. But it doesn’t go away.”
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