More Than a Message: Finding Meaning in Sympathy Cards

I suspect having cancer must suck. Indeed, when I think about cancer, my mind instantly runs to terms like “malignant,” “tumor,” “fight,” and “chemotherapy.” All things which one might generously call undesirable. A phrase that doesn’t jump out at me is “funny.” However, Mark Steel’s The Leopard in my House: One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland is an undeniably funny book.

In it, the author, broadcaster, stand-up comedian, and newspaper columnist recounts the extraordinary year in which he was diagnosed and treated for throat cancer. The book is peppered with vivid, often graphic descriptions of what it’s like when your neck is repeatedly blasted with radiation (expect a lot of talk about mucus). But it’s also filled with warm, witty reflections on his relationships, his fellow cancer patients, his brushes with mortality, and the miraculous feeling of doing something as simple as swallowing water again.

Undoubtedly, all of the above is ripe for philosophical analysis, and this fact isn’t lost on Mark himself. In one chapter of the book, after receiving a recommendation from a fellow cancer sufferer, Mark considers the disease, the effect it’s having on his life, and how one can wrestle with forces beyond one’s control, via Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Taking a stoic approach, he considers the futility of asking “Why me?” or looking for fairness in something as arbitrary as a cancer diagnosis. It’s a grounded, practical perspective — and, I think, a wise one.

Yet, what I want to do here is look past all the fertile philosophical material that Mark provides us in his book and go in on something very specific: sympathy cards.

In Chapter 11, Mark talks about how awkward it can be talking to someone who has cancer. How unsure we often feel about what to say. That uncertainty, he argues, is natural, but it shouldn’t stop us from saying anything at all.

Of course, this transfers to non face-to-face communications. I’m sure you too have faced the daunting task of writing a meaningful message in a card. It might be something as innocuous as a birthday or leaving card, or as substantial as a commiserations or sympathy card. Yet, despite having some vague sense of what you want to say, you don’t know the correct words. This makes the whole thing slightly stressful, and the temptation is there to simply not write in the card at all. To not say anything. This, Mark says, is a mistake:

… here’s my tip if you know someone who lands in a serious medical condition. If you’re not sure what to say to someone, don’t worry because anything you say is better than nothing. I can’t remember the exact words of many of the messages I got, I can only remember that they came. Every email, text or call is a reminder that you matter to someone and that is critical in getting you passed the difficult moments. Don’t worry about saying the wrong thing. All the person remembers is that you got in touch.

This, I think, gets at something we often forget when it comes to comforting those who are ill. You’re not expected to craft the perfect, poetic paragraph that lifts someone out of despair. The point of a message, whether text, email, or card, isn’t to fix everything. It’s not even to promise that everything will be okay (because you can’t know that). Rather, it’s to remind the person they haven’t been forgotten. That they’re in your thoughts. That you’ve taken a moment out of your day and dedicated a sliver of your attention to them. That they matter.

These gestures, small as they may seem, speak volumes. They signal that when given the choice between silence and acknowledgement, you chose to say something. And in doing so, you affirmed that their struggle is worthy of notice.

But as I read Mark’s reflections on this, my brain, never missing an opportunity to be pessimistic, conjured a darker scenario: what if the message doesn’t actually come from the person it claims to?

It’s a familiar trope in film and TV: a high-powered executive learns that someone in their office is unwell and tells their assistant to “send a card,” maybe flowers too. Or worse, the executive never finds out at all, and the card is sent by a dutiful underling who signs it on their behalf. In such cases, the card still arrives, and the recipient may still feel touched that someone cared enough to reach out. But on some level, the gesture feels hollow. There’s a subtle, unsettling deception in play: the card wasn’t really from the sender it claims to be. The sentiment was manufactured.

And while the card might still do some good (after all, someone did something), it raises uncomfortable questions. Does intention matter as much as the action itself? Can a false gesture still provide real comfort? Or is there a quiet harm in pretending to care, when the person supposedly sending the message never even knew you were unwell?

These questions seem even more relevant with the advent of easily accessible generative AI. It’s now easy to offload the difficult task of writing a heartfelt message to a tool like ChatGPT. You face the blank space in the card, ask an AI to fill it, and copy the result. To the recipient, it looks like you took the time to write something meaningful. But in reality, you thought of them just enough to delegate the task to a machine.

In that light, the hollowness of the corporate-card trope becomes more personal, more widespread. The authenticity that gives these messages their power starts to erode. Worse, it casts suspicion on the entire genre. If one message might be synthetic, why not all of them?

This unease reminds me of a central theme from Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals. In it, Han argues that our society is losing the shared symbolic acts that once gave meaning to human experience. Rituals, like writing a sympathy card, once required time, presence, and emotional investment. Today, however, many of these acts are reduced to gestures of efficiency, of communication without community. It would seem evident that a card composed by ChatGPT might technically fulfill the form, but it lacks the symbolic weight Han insists is essential. The message becomes a simulation of care, not the thing itself.

Now, I acknowledge that this is a niche worry. And, at least for now, probably an overblown one. Most people still write their own messages, even if they’re clumsy or awkward. And frankly, the awkwardness is part of the point as it shows effort. A messy, imperfect message from a friend is infinitely more valuable than a flawless, ghostwritten one.

But just because it’s niche doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. The emotional stakes are high. As Steel points out, those messages can be a lifeline. They are something to cling to in the middle of immense physical and emotional suffering. They are not just words; they are reminders of human connection. And if we’re not careful, the convenience of automation might start to chip away at that.

What’s the solution, then? Honestly, I don’t have one. But I do know that next time I sit down to write something in a sympathy card, I’ll try not to overthink it. I’ll write something, however clunky or awkward, and trust, as Steel suggests, that the act of writing matters more than the words themselves.