The Toughest Conversations: Losing a Spouse to Cancer

A lot of the interviews we feature on SurvivorNet are with people who have actually taken on cancer, but what about those who have to watch someone they love take on the disease? This is a different kind of interview. John Duberstein lost his wife, writer Nina Riggs, to metastatic triple negative breast cancer. He says that while he was watching her suffer from the disease, he couldn’t help but wish things could go back to normal … but Nina had already embraced her new normal.

“I really wanted things to go back to normal, whatever that meant,” John says. “She was not for that. She wanted to embrace the existence that she had, even before she knew she was going to die imminently. I did not want to talk about what was going to happen with me after Nina died. Nina is the one that really brought it up, she brought it up a number of times. She wanted to make sure that I knew that it was OK … she really wanted me to have another relationship after she was gone.”