Do we really want to “Fuck Cancer”? What I realised when my Dad started dying

I was walking along the main street of Bicheno, a small seaside town in Tasmania, breathing in the crisp salty air that blew off the ocean when I saw it. I was weeks into a month-long holiday and was more relaxed than I’d felt in many years, despite not being able to see my father for what was likely his last Christmas. As I passed a row of cars parked on the side of the road, a typical Australian tradie’s ute caught my eye. Not the ute itself, but what was emblazoned across the rear windscreen: a giant white sticker that exclaimed, in a neo-gothic font, “Fuck Cancer”. 

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen this statement. For a few years I’d noticed it becoming a popular response to cancer diagnoses on social media. But this was the first time I’d ever seen it in block letters 30cm high on the rear windscreen of a ute—a space typically reserved for stickers of girls in bikinis, lewd jokes, or trite slogans such as ‘Carpe Diem’ and ‘Such is Life’. So it stopped me in my tracks.

As I stared at the sticker, I thought to myself, “Has Fuck Cancer become the Carpe Diem of those touched by cancer? Has it been adopted by the masses as some kind of defiant coping mechanism? And, if so, was that something we really wanted to do as human beings? Did we really want to Fuck Cancer?”

When cancer came knocking

My father was diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma in mid 2023—a type of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos that affects the thin lining surrounding the lungs. He was given 12–18 months to live. A year later, it had spread to his brain and started to affect his cognition. And by the time I found myself wandering the streets of Bicheno in early 2025, it was somewhat of a miracle that he was still alive. 

Dad was exposed to asbestos in his job as a land surveyor in the construction industry on the Sunshine Coast in the 1970s, before they knew that asbestos was deadly. Back then, they used to spray it around inside wall cavities with high-pressure hoses to insulate steel beams and ceilings, like it was some kind of magic pixie dust. In Dad’s case, exposure to this asbestos ‘slurry’ would lead to terminal cancer.

The power of words

I had never understood the sentiment of the Fuck Cancer slogan—it didn’t sit well with me. To be honest, I’d never even liked the default language around cancer that assumed the person with cancer had to ‘fight’ it to win—as if they had to adopt a soldier’s mentality who had been conscripted and sent to war.

You might be thinking, “They’re just words, Ross, get over yourself”. But words are powerful. Each word carries its own energy.

Ever since my wife and I named one of our cats Donnie Darko and he went time travelling and never returned, I always warn people to be careful what you name your pets—and children. Because words tell your brain what energy to adopt and how to react. Words are literally tiny instructions for your thoughts and emotions. And sometimes words even seemed to be able to transfer their energy on to forms—like cats. Or was it the cat’s energy that subconsciously made us choose that name? I don’t know. Either way, in terms of adopting a mindset and embodying a type of energy to face cancer with, Fuck Cancer felt very violent and negative to me.

But I kept these murmurings to myself, because I figured that maybe I didn’t have enough experience dealing with loved ones and cancer to know what it was really like. Maybe I was being naïve.  

As I stood there, though, on the side of the road in Bicheno, staring at the sticker on the back of the ute and thinking about my Dad, the last thing I wanted to do was Fuck Cancer.

None of it was fair

I had every right to feel that way, if I wanted to. No one would have judged me if I felt angry and cheated, sad and full of rage at how unfair cancer was. After all, my Dad was one of the healthiest people I’d ever known. He went bushwalking, climbed mountains, and somehow actually enjoyed marathons. He ate nothing but healthy food all his life. He didn’t smoke, and he barely drank alcohol aside from the odd glass of wine at a celebratory dinner. Basically, he treated his body like a temple, and yet, through no fault of his own, just by doing his job, he now had terminal cancer and was very sick.

I had been eager to visit him in Queensland for his last Christmas, but because my wife was facing her own complex health issues and needed me home, instead, I was standing in the main street of Bicheno thinking about how long he might live. None of it was fair. It was awful. And yet, in that moment, the Fuck Cancer sticker that was currently assaulting my visual field made even less sense to me than it ever had.

The man I once knew

Of course, I had experienced many emotions since my dad’s initial cancer diagnosis—like anger, frustration and sadness. You could even say that I had started grieving for my father—for the man I once knew—who was slipping further and further away from me with each passing day. Sometimes, when I looked at his withering frame, he reminded me more of a World War II concentration camp prisoner than my Dad.

The man who used to run up mountains with his camera to get the perfect picture from the summit, while his children panted and puffed below and waved him on, now needed a walking frame to traverse the 10 metres from his bed to the toilet. The man who loved to write long letters and in-depth emails to me, now took 5 minutes to write his own name on a piece of paper. The man who used to express himself eloquently with words, and sing songs at the local markets for hours, now struggled to construct basic sentences—painstakingly trying to find the right pieces to the mental puzzle so that the words came out as he intended. They often didn’t.

I felt a profound sadness that I was losing this man, my father. And there was nothing I could do about it. I was completely helpless. It often felt like I was stuck watching this horrible slow-motion movie of his final decline. And yet, despite all of this, the idea of embodying these angry and violent emotions still made no sense to me. 

For starters, what good would it have done? Who was the Fuck Cancer mentality going to help? If I paraded around Dad being angry at his cancer all the time, that would just make life more difficult for him. I wasn’t going to hide my emotions from him—but my role was to help, not hinder. The last thing I wanted was for him to feel guilty about his cancer causing me intense emotions and suddenly feel like he was too much of a burden. Because that would literally cause him more pain and take precious energy away from him trying to survive. 

Embodying those emotions was hardly going to help me either. If I identified with them and became them, that’s where I would get stuck: in anger, frustration and sadness. And they are not fun places to live.

You can’t get rid of emotions

To me, Fuck Cancer felt like a completely counterproductive mindset and energy to adopt. At the root of Fuck Cancer is anger, which is understandable—but it also felt dismissive. Energetically, Fuck Cancer reminded me of classic macho Australianisms like, “swallow some concrete and harden up” or “she’ll be right, mate”, that declare themselves loudly but swerve dangerously into toxic positivity and seek to push aside any deeper, more complex emotions.

And if I’ve learned anything from my 45 years on this planet, it’s that you can’t ‘get rid’ of emotions and pain. You can’t run from them, and you can’t just mentally ‘toughen up’ and magically avoid them. You might succeed in burying them for a while; but when those zombie emotions return, you’ll be wishing you never did.

The only real way to ‘get rid’ of emotions is to feel them. There’s no getting around them. Which is why We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is my favourite children’s book. The characters face various obstacles along the way, but the outcome is always the same: “Uh-oh! Grass! Long wavy grass. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!” Emotions are exactly the same. The only way out is through.

Despite what boys, in particular, have been told for generations, expressing emotions is not a sign of weakness. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Expressing emotions in a healthy way requires a certain degree of self-awareness and vulnerability. And these can only come from a place of strength, deep within your being. Not a strength that encourages you to be strong in the traditional sense; a strength that overrides your fears and conditioning and allows you to be soft. To let your guard down and allow the emotion to flow through you.

Moving beyond the emotions

Allow yourself to feel the full weight of an emotion. Let it have its 15 minutes of fame. Don’t try to stifle it by telling yourself you ‘shouldn’t’ be feeling it. Really feel it. Yell out your anger and cry out your tears until you feel it move right through your body. Sometimes I like to just get in the car, close the doors and have a good yell. That might sound a little unhinged at first, but I think it’s much healthier than yelling at someone else for no reason. For instance, I’m not going to go and yell at my wife, just to have someone to express my emotion ‘at’, when it has nothing to do with her. I just let myself feel it and let it out.

But I’m also careful to not identify with the emotions as I’m expressing them. They are not who I am. They are a momentary, fleeting feeling. To me, an emotion is literally just a ball of energy in motion (e-motion). And if you let it, it will move right through you and out the other side. And then it’s gone.

Instead of adopting a Fuck Cancer mindset and getting stuck in that pain, I much prefer the idea of expressing emotions and moving through them—because then you’re free of them. They no longer have any power over you.

And when that happens, you get to see what’s on the other side of the emotions. Which, in the case of cancer and death, is probably more emotions. But, eventually, something new arises—acceptance. And if you welcome acceptance in and sit with it—if you carry it around with you, breathing it in it out as you go about your days—you can even come to a place of peace. A peace that will soothe you. A peace that can be all-encompassing. A peace that is big enough to fill the depths of your despair. Or, as my Dad described it to me last year, in a surreal moment of clarity: “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding”.

Finding that peace is how you really win.