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Des Bishop speaks of heartbreak about his father's terminal illness

Comedian speaks about father's battle with cancer

DARA KELLY,

IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Friday, January 14, 2011, 5:15 AM

Updated Tuesday, February 1, 2011, 6:58 AM

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Des Bishop

Irish American comedian Des Bishop spoke to the press this week about his struggle to face the reality that his father is terminally ill.

Bishop's father Michael,74, has terminal lung cancer and stopped undergoing chemotherapy earlier this week.

The comedian told the press that his father and his extended family have been coping with the diagnosis for the past 15 months.

During that time, to grapple with the unwelcome news, Bishop wrote a show with help from his father called "My Father Was Nearly James Bond." The critically acclaimed show addresses Bishop senior's cancer diagnosis and it is currently touring around Ireland.

"It is difficult," the funny man told the press this week. "My father came on stage with me for a few of the shows in Edinburgh and New York, but he is a lot weaker now and can't do so as much."

"I know that ultimately it will be very difficult, but until it happens, you don't really know how it will hit you. I am going to go back over to see him this month," Bishop said.

"The show is almost like a funny documentary, a funny story about a real life, and how illness affects the relationship between a father and a son, how it affects the dynamic in a family, loads of things. It's me trying to make sense of the most profound moment anybody has in their lifetime - one of their parents heading towards death," he added.

The New York born but Dublin-based comedian said he believed that lung cancer sufferers received far less sympathy from the public, regardless of whether they smoked, because it's common to attribute a certain degree of blame to those who developed it.

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grandmaguns | Feb 01, 2011, 05:33 PM EST

The blame put on lung cancer sufferers is real unfortunatly, because anytime I tell someone about a friend or a relatives's lung cancer the first question is always "Did he or she smoke?" Yet we grew up in an area where the underground dumps would catch on fire and blanket the area and swam in polluted waters. No one asks the breast cancer victims like myself if our personal life styles or our enviorment brought on our cancers.

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Searlit | Feb 01, 2011, 11:27 AM EST

It has been proven that nicotine was added to cigarettes to make them even more addictive. It is sad that cigarettes were advertised so heavily, in the not to distant past. I am sympathetic to people who are stricken with lung cancer, if they smoked or not. Even though smokers complain about the ban on smoking, because they're addicted, they must know that it is for their own good and for the good of non-smokers, not to be exposed to second hand smoke.

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kscorletta | Feb 01, 2011, 09:54 AM EST

I absolutely agree with Mr. Bishop. Indeed, the first question on the Health Case History for anyone with a lung complaint is:Are you or have you ever been a smoker? In these days of computers being able to categorize everything in order of the first question on the list, just about everyone in the U,S, of my age was once a smoker. Anyone who lived in a state where you couldn't drink, couldn't buy a condom because the druggist knew your family and said"Go home!", and didn't have a car to prove they were cool probably smoked. It was the "safest" way to have a cheap thrill and yes, we all became addicted. My husband died of lung cancer. He fought the disease for 4& 1/2 yrs. He had stopped smoking 13 years before that after a mild heart attack. He quit cold turkey. Unfortunately, he did continue to drive through the metropolitan Washington D.C. area every day to work and we lived on the water in a state that suffered not only the highest rate of in-ground pollution from the Chesapeake Bay, but a state that had the highest rate of cancer deaths at the time. Those facts never were noted and I cringed every time the question was asked in the next 4 years. It was a built in indictment of guilt directed at the victim and because pollution from other causes was not discussed ever on a health questionnaire the guilt was confined to the victim and his "bad behavior". I hope the state's and federal government will eventually share that guilt, especially for the thousands of victims of lung cancer who never smoked in the first place.

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