Simone Ledward Boseman, the widow of Chadwick Boseman, revealed how she “felt sure” he would beat cancer.
In an in-depth interview with Today, Simone recalled Chadwick’s relentless spirit and his final days.
“We both felt very sure that he would make it through,” Simone shared.“It was going to be a challenging moment, but something that he would come out on the other side of and be fine. They would do a surgery, he would do some chemo afterward, and he would be OK. There wasn’t much talk at all of the possibility of him not being OK on the other side of that.”
Simone also revealed that they discovered Chadwick’s stage 3 cancer diagnosis in 2016, and she married him months before his passing in August 2020.
“I didn’t know that he was experiencing anything until he had already been to the doctor twice,” she explained. “It all seemed to come about very suddenly. It was a matter of weeks that he started not feeling well.”
CHADWICK WANTED TO KEEP HIS CANCER DIAGNOSIS PRIVATE
Eventually, Chadwick’s cancer progressed to stage 4, and he decided to keep his health status private.
“Chad was not a person who would have wanted to be treated any differently because people knew that he was sick,” she explained. “The work is what was keeping him moving, so he didn’t want the work to suffer just because he was sick. He didn’t want to be handled with kid gloves because people thought he wasn’t going to be able to do his job and slide underneath falling cabinets and run across fields.”
Simone said that thinking that Chadwick was not going to make it was “like a betrayal of faith.”
“There are a lot of moments where I look back on that time and wish that we had been able to find a way to talk about that,” she said.
Although he was receiving treatment, Chadwick continued to work throughout the process.
“The work is what was keeping him moving. So he didn’t want the work to suffer just because he was sick,” Simone said. “He didn’t want to be handled with kid gloves because people thought he wasn’t going to be able to do his job and slide underneath falling cabinets and run across fields.