I Know How It Feels to Have to Tell Your Three Small Children, “Mommy Has Cancer”

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.