It’s been six years since the death of Chadwick Boseman, who passed away at the age of 43 in August 2020 from colon cancer. The actor kept his health battle private, leaving his fans and colleagues to wonder what he might have experienced in the four years leading up to his impressionable death.
In a new interview with TODAY on Friday, March 20, Boseman’s widow, Simone Ledward-Boseman, shed light on never-before-heard details about her husband’s death and how he managed his cancer while balancing the bulk of his acting career.
Chadwick Boseman Hid His Cancer Symptoms From His Wife
GettyMuch like his fans, Simone was also kept in the dark for a period of time as Chadwick experienced symptoms early on.
“I didn’t know that he was experiencing anything until he had already been to the doctor twice,” she told Craig Melvin of TODAY. “It all seemed to come about very suddenly. It was a matter of weeks that he started not feeling well. And because he was so young, he wasn’t even at the point where he would consider having a colonoscopy.”
When the “Black Panther” actor was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer in 2016, he and his wife were adamant that he would beat it, recover and go on to continue his profound impact in film.
“To us, it was going to be a challenging moment, but something that he would come out on the other side of and be fine,” Simone explained. “And they would do a surgery, and he would do some chemo afterward, and he would be OK. And there wasn’t much talk at all of the possibility of him not being OK on the other side of that.”
Simone shared that in 2018, Chadwick was cancer-free, saying that time was “a beautiful year.” By the end of the year, though, the actor’s cancer returned and progressed to stage 4.
Simone expressed her regrets about not being able to talk with her husband about the potential of him dying, telling TODAY that it felt “like a betrayal of faith” to think of that possibility — let alone talk about it.
“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 added.
Chadwick Boseman’s Wife Explains Why He Kept His Cancer Diagnosis Private
Chadwick’s widow also opened up on his decision to keep his cancer diagnosis to himself before he died. Although he starred in several films in the years before his death, Chadwick performed each role while quietly battling colon cancer and undergoing treatments. Notable films he starred in include “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2020), “Da 5 Bloods” (2020), “21 Bridges” (2019), “Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame” (2018), “Marshall” (2017) and of course, “Black Panther” (2018).
“Chad was not a person that would have wanted to be treated any differently because people knew that he was sick,” she said of her husband’s decision to stay private.
“The work is what was keeping him moving, so he didn’t want the work to suffer just because he was sick,” she added. “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.”
