Martijn Krabbé has caused a shock wave with the sad news that he has metastatic lung cancer and is terminally ill. “One question came to mind when I heard it.”
Martijn Krabbé has known for almost a year that he has metastatic lung cancer, but the rest of the country heard last week that he is terminally ill. “When I heard that he had lung cancer, a question came to mind that I think came to everyone’s mind,” says media critic Victor Vlam in the podcast The Communicados.
Smoking
Lars Duursma, Victor’s co-host who is known as a communications expert, also had that. “Yes: has he smoked?”
Victor: “Yes. Yes. I always wonder how interviewers deal with that. Antoinnette simply put it to him by stating that he had a fairly wild lifestyle with drink, drugs and indeed: smoking.”
Here he points to Antoinnette Scheulderman, the woman who interviewed Martijn extensively for the magazine LINDA about his illness.
Fifteen years
What did Martijn say to that? Victor: “He says that he hasn’t smoked for fifteen years and has at least been away from it for fifteen years, but it really is such a dilemma, because people want to know. It is literally the first question people always ask when you hear that someone has lung cancer.”
“But at the same time: the reason why it is difficult to report a lot about this and provide a lot of information about it or to ask that question very directly is because we want to know, but actually for the wrong reason. It says something bad about our nature as humans that we want to know.”
Not afraid
Why does it say something bad? Victor: “Because we want to know because we actually want to think to ourselves: it is his own fault and if you don’t smoke, then you don’t have to worry about it.”
Lars: “It is of course very antisocial to have that thought.”
Victor: “It is of course very annoying to actually blame a terminal patient: you see, you just shouldn’t have smoked. You can’t put it that simply, so it is right that there is resistance to this, but people are somewhere looking for that reassurance that they will be spared this fate.”
Unjustly
Lars sees it more nuanced. “I don’t think it’s so much that it’s someone’s fault, but that you want to tell yourself: this isn’t going to happen to me. Every time you see something around you, you look for something to reassure yourself: this is not going to happen to me, because I am not an alcoholic, because I do not smoke.”
Victor concludes: “Agree, but the two are connected. You blame someone else. You actually say: ‘It’s Martijn’s own fault’, because that means you can say: ‘Then it won’t happen to me.’ It is unjustified, but that is often the implicit idea behind it.”