“She Aged in Fast Forward” (Exclusive)

HE NEEDS TO KNOW

• Mark Burkholder photographed the declining health of his wife Paige, who was diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer at age 32.

• Burkholder tells People that the couple wanted to document the “rawer, more honest parts” of cancer progression, rather than the common narrative of it as a “heroic fight.”

• Now encouraging other carers to share ‘radical honesty about illness’

A widower talks about losing his wife to cancer and why he chose to photograph her declining health over three years.

Mark Burkholder’s wife, Paige, was diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer in 2022, a few months after the couple moved to the San Juan Islands, a small archipelago off the coast of Washington state. A history teacher, Paige had received a job offer there.

“The plan for moving here was to reconnect,” Burkholder, a writer and marketer, tells PEOPLE of the 2021 move. “After we moved here, she started having things that you just don’t think much about — some stomach pain, a little back pain, and then it just started getting worse.”

The pain got worse over time and he went to the doctor for a scan.

The day she found out the results of her scan, she met Mark at a local coffee shop. “I remember looking out the window and seeing his face,” he says. “I knew right away that something was wrong.”

Scans identified a mass on her liver – something the doctor said was “a tumor the size of a softball…almost certainly cancer.”

“He was fast and he was aggressive,” Burkholder tells PEOPLE. In September 2022, Paige was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer of the liver’s bile ducts. When treatment began in December, the tumor was the size of a football.

Paige’s first chemotherapy treatment was around Christmas Day. “I drove through a blizzard, whiteout conditions.” Burkholder says he remembers watching the snow fall as his wife called people over and “whirled it around a little bit, telling them, ‘This is cancer I’m going to live with.’ “

“After the first call or two, I sat down next to her and said, ‘You know what’s going on — that this is terminal, right?'” he says. “She was creating hope for herself and for them. The way I look at it, my role as a caregiver was to live in reality.”

That’s when Burkholder started thinking about sharing an honest look at cancer. “So much of the stuff we see about cancer, it’s like one position, like, ‘Warrior!’ ” he says. “But when you’re home alone and you’re curled up in a ball on the couch, hurting and crying, and then you see someone online who just got picked on a day that felt good, oh my gosh, it’s really isolating to see what people are sharing and the story that they attach to it that causes cancer.”

“It’s kind of described as this heroic struggle – but I think it’s really more like trench warfare in the First World War: you’re in a trench for months and you can never sleep because bombs are going off. There’s gunfire all the time.”

Burkholder began photographing and filming their journey together: Paige with terminal cancer and him as a caregiver — but they didn’t post anything online.

“The parts we really wanted to share were the rawer, more honest parts, and sharing them while traveling was hard. When we felt good enough to think about recording something, we didn’t want to use that time to throw ourselves back into the mess we’d just been through a month earlier.”

“[Posting] it basically didn’t happen until she passed,” he said.

He posted his first TikTok on December 13, three days after Paige, 35, died overnight at home.

The first post has been viewed nearly 250,000 times. Another TikTok, where Burkholder shared how she handled her death with their dog Olive, was viewed 1.2 million times. And when she described her cancer as “fast-forward aging,” that TikTok was viewed nearly 2 million times. As Burkholder analyzed the reactions of others who had lost loved ones to cancer, she realized that the story she wanted to tell was one of caring.

“A lot of caregiving is just sitting on the couch 24 hours a day because Paige would pass out, or be in pain, or be in pain. When she was conscious, I’d want to be with her, and when she needed something, I had to be there,” he says.

“The hard part of caregiving is being present 24 hours a day and always being on call. And for me, the focus on caregiving is just because we talk so much about cancer and supporting people with cancer, and I just hadn’t seen as much about the realities of caregiving, especially the mental and physical impact of the 24-hour nature.”

“Every cancer journey is so unique,” ​​he says. “I don’t think I can give any advice on fighting cholangiocarcinoma. I actually don’t know that much about cholangiocarcinoma. What I do know and what I can support is presence.” He shares that he also wants to offer actionable tips, such as how to write the doctor “an email that will get through and is clear and not just have the doctor respond with another question that delays things by three days.”

He wants to share a “field manual” on how to take people up on their offer to help: “Hundreds of people will message you and say, ‘If there’s anything I can do, let me know.’ Well, you know what you should do then: Create a website with five links to a mass train and a GoFundMe and an Amazon wish list and whatever.”

As he explains, “I needed support, and if everyone in your life is willing to provide support but doesn’t know how, all that support just disappears, which I think happens 99 percent of the time.”

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But as Burkholder tells PEOPLE, his overall message is one of “radical honesty about the disease.”

“In a strange way, if you show too much of the brave warrior, it costs you a lot,” he says. “Everybody says, ‘Well, I’m just a strong warrior against cancer. They don’t need help and support.’ But if you’re willing to be honest about how horrible this process is, then people can actually help you and understand that you need help. That’s my mission.”

The response from people who have lost loved ones has been huge: “Everything that Paige and I thought was true,” he says. “People are suffering out there and everybody is lost … that’s kind of the big heartbreak for me in all of this.”

Read the original article on People