Chadwick Boseman‘s widow, Simone Ledward Boseman, is opening up about his battle with cancer — nearly six years after the Black Panther star’s untimely death.
Chadwick was first diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer in 2016, with Simone sharing with Today‘s Craig Melvin on Friday that the couple was “very confident [he] would make it through.”
“To us, it was going be a challenging moment, but something that he would come out on the other side of and be fine. And they would do a surgery, and he would do some chemo afterward, and he would be OK,” she said. “And there wasn’t much talk at all of the possibility of him not being OK on the other side of that.”
Simone explained that the possibility of her husband not surviving felt “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 cancer-free in 2018 — what Simone described as “a beautiful year” — his illness returned with a stage 4 diagnosis. Chadwick died in August 2020 at just 43 years old.
Simone Ledward Boseman on ‘Today.’
Credit: Today/NBC
In the years since his death, fellow celebrities, including James Van Der Beek and Catherine O’Hara, have also lost battles with colon cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, colorectal cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths when numbers for men and women are combined. It’s expected to cause about 55,230 deaths during 2026.
Symptoms of colon cancer can include, but are not limited to, a change in bowel habits, blood in the stool or rectal bleeding, ongoing discomfort (gas, pain, or cramps) in the stomach, and unexplained weight loss, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Simone told Today that Chadwick’s symptoms initially came on “very suddenly” and, in a matter of weeks, “he wasn’t feeling well.”
“And because he was so young, he wasn’t even at the point where he would consider having a colonoscopy,” she added, noting that she still doesn’t know “his family history.”
Awareness of the disease has multiplied in recent years, in part thanks to Van Der Beek and others sharing their stories. (The Dawson’s Creek star died at 48 in February following a years-long journey with colorectal cancer.) While she is incredibly thankful for the spread of information, Simone did express why Chadwick chose to keep his cancer battle private.
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“Chad was not a person that would have wanted to be treated any differently because people knew that he was sick,” she explained, adding that he continued to take on projects throughout his treatment.
“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.
As for how she’s doing these days, Simone admitted that her sadness and grief are always there.
“The edges get less sharp, I think, is the best way to put it,” she said. “There are still edges and there are still a lot of painful moments. But I think it becomes easier to find the love in those moments, as well. You become more accustomed to carrying the weight of grief. But it doesn’t go away.”
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