A woman has gone public about how she left her terminally ill husband because he wasn’t giving her enough attention— and wonders why the public has been so hard on her.
Yana Fry, who is now in her 40s, married her ex-husband 18 years ago when she was 22.
Not long after getting married, her husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
“We couldn’t really think about our future,” Fry said. “How can you plan for your future as a newly-married couple when you’re struggling with something like cancer?”
Fry was living in New York at the time, and claimed she quickly grew tired of the attention of others constantly being directed towards her husband.
“People react in one of two ways to critical illnesses, I’ve seen it over and over,” she explained. “The first type was how my husband unfortunately was…The people who drown in self-pity. The second type of people are those who are instead concerned with everyone around them.”
As her husband’s cancer progressed, the wife seemingly became resentful.
“We saw different kinds of doctors. Not a single person ever offered me help,” she said. “They never asked, ‘Do you need a support system? Are you part of a counseling group?”
According to the New York Post, Fry made it about five years before she started thinking about leaving her husband.
“It wasn’t until that fifth year that I started to think about leaving,” she confessed. “But I felt like I couldn’t say anything. When someone is dying next to you, you feel like you can’t talk about your own well-being because you compare it to their suffering.”
Ultimately, she would commit to abandoning her husband after losing a friend to suicide.
“It was my first funeral, and it was very shocking,” Fry said. “In my mind at the time, suicide became an option, even though I had never considered that before. I was in such a bad state. It was very clear to me that if I didn’t save myself, I was probably going to die.”
Fry was surprised that the man she pledged to be with “until death do us part” took the divorce so poorly.
“His main focus was more and more so about him,” she said. “At the beginning of his treatment, he was still checking on me. [But] He felt even more pity for himself because of the divorce. I can’t say that he was hugely supportive.”
Seemingly incapable of self-awareness, Fry went on to note that she was shocked at how her decision angered other people.
“What was even harder was the reaction of society, which I didn’t expect,” she said. “People were in pain and they wanted to blame someone.”
Fry’s husband would remarry before passing away two years later, supported by loved ones until the end.
The ex-wife discovered her former husband had died through social media.
“I actually found out on Facebook that he passed away,” she said. “There was a picture of him from a common friend, and it said, ‘Rest in Peace.’” My first reaction was, ‘You must be joking. Someone would have called me and told me.’ But no one did.”
Fry has since remarried and lives in Singapore as a life coach. She has no regrets about deserting her former husband, and claims that while she needed therapy to cope with the decision that she made, she feels it was the right one.
“I feel we, especially women, are just usually brought up with the mentality to serve others, but when you go against it, you learn a lot about resilience and self-awareness,” Fry stated.
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