Are You Here? Making Space for Family in Emerging Adults’ Experience of Cancer

Authors

  • Sandip K. Dhaliwal Faculty of Nursing, University of Calgary

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.55016/ojs/jah.v2025Y2025.80624

Abstract

Emerging adulthood (encompassing ages 18 to 29) is a period of life scaffolded by societal and developmental expectations of independence. Being confronted by a diagnosis of cancer launches emerging adults into new ways of being, sometimes at odds with these expectations. In this paper, I explore how cancer may be experienced as an interruption to an emerging adult’s lift script, and the expectations of childhood versus youth through an interpretation of Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life painting series. I explore how cultural and traditional beliefs about one’s youth invoke an articulation of time “as passing” or progressing that a diagnosis of cancer puts into question. Subsequently, I consider how emerging adulthood requires being in a liminal space of self-understanding that is complicated by cancer. To conclude, I discuss Paul Ricoeur’s ideas about narrative identity and self to consider how we may support emerging adults’ capacity for imagination of meaningful familial relationships.

Author Biography

Sandip K. Dhaliwal, Faculty of Nursing, University of Calgary

Sandip Dhaliwal is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary. Her doctoral research is a hermeneutic study aimed at better understanding how a diagnosis of blood cancer affects the parent-child and sibling relationships of emerging adults. Sandip’s background entails nine years of experience across various outpatient and inpatient settings in the field of hematology and bone marrow transplant (BMT). She is currently a clinical research nurse for hematology and BMT at the Arthur J. E. Child Cancer Centre in Calgary, Alberta, where she oversees ethical and responsible patient care for patients on a clinical trial.

 

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Published

2025-01-06

Issue

2025: 2025

Section

Articles

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