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This is a column about Andy. Last week, Andy’s partner, Loraine, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Andy is scared.

As human beings, we love control. It gives meaning to our life; it helps us maintain our focus when the tumultuous waves of randomness sweep over us. For Andy, the fact that he is unable to do anything tangible to save her eats away at his core.

She, like most women, is a rock in the face of adversity. Women handle illness far better than their male counterparts, simply because they are not fogged by an overactive ego. For them the hunting and gathering can only take place once you have somewhere to take it to, and something to do with it. They are creatures of thought and nuance. Men rush into situations pell-mell; sprinting with the fear that if they stop they might realise their actions are not constructive. Women, on the other hand, are meticulous walkers. They tread softly with the full knowledge that every action will reverberate.

Andy has decided to battle Loraine’s illness with humour, something she doesn’t always find funny.

“I told her that she should get both breasts removed, at least then there’ll be symmetry,” he said, chuckling. But there was no throat in his laughter; no sprite of merriment dancing in his eyes at a well-told joke. Andy is scared.

His fear, however, is as much about him as it is about her. He’s never managed very well on his own, and now with three children, the crisis that could afflict him has reached atomic proportions. He is lost without her, his arms reach out when the dark clouds muster… she finds them. If she goes there will be nothing to touch anymore; nothing to grasp. A man could drown.

Loraine’s scared too. Her fear is also about him. She knows his weaknesses, and there are many. But the one that towers over the rest is the one that makes him the most vulnerable — his inability to move out of a tragic landscape. Andy’s penchant for tragedy is mired in a youth spent reading too much Goethe and Hardy. He prefers the wishing well of self-pity to the carefree winds of emotional progress. When you get on with your life, his little world gets on with him.

She hopes he will manage if the cancer breaks through her physical fortress; she knows he won’t. So she fights on, and he follows in her wake, grasping, clinging.

“Cancer,” she told me, “is a strange disease. Even if you’re cured it will still kill you. Maybe not physically, but the welts of sickness mar more than just the corporeal; they lance the psyche, puncture the ego and belittle fortitude.”

Andy wonders if cancer ever really goes away. “Does it just hide in the deep recesses of our body, away from the drugs and hope? It’s a bit like alcoholism or drug addiction isn’t it? You spend the rest of your life making sure it doesn’t tear out of its box and rip you apart.”

Loraine will survive, as will Andy. She will continue to be the bedrock on which he builds his sandcastles, he will keep the smile on her lips by being himself (sometimes inappropriate, often selfish, always a dream away from reality).

“You’re a writer Dean,” said Andy, a morbid angel glided to his shoulder, “Have you ever written an obituary?”

“One, my grandfather’s.”

“You think you could write another?”

“No. There’s no need to, nobody’s dead.”

I will never write an obituary for Andy or Loraine. What will I say? That they were in love? That he lets her down when she needs him the most? That she tears at him with her pragmatic talons? I can’t say those things, even though they’re true.

No, I will not write their obituary. Obituaries are reserved for those we want to remember. I don’t need to remember Andy and Loraine. They’re a part of me, and of you. We don’t write obituaries about ourselves.