Chadwick Boseman’s widow opened up about his colon cancer diagnosis six years after his death, revealing they were both “confident” he was going to “make it through” at the time.
During an appearance on “Today” on Friday, Taylor Simone Ledward Boseman said that she and her late husband were also completely shocked when he first received his Stage 3 diagnosis back in 2016.
“I didn’t know that he was experiencing anything until he had already been to the doctor twice,” she said. “It all seemed to come about very suddenly. It was a matter of weeks that he started not feeling well.”
Ledward Boseman explained that colon cancer is “really tricky in that way.”
“And because he was so young, he wasn’t even at the point where he would consider having a colonoscopy,” she said.
“To us, it was going be a challenging moment, but something that he would come out on the other side of and be fine,” Ledward Boseman said. “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.”
In 2018, Boseman’s cancer briefly went into remission, and then “Black Panther” was released, shooting Boseman into celebrity superstardom. His widow called it a “beautiful year.”
The next year, his cancer returned, and Boseman decided to pop the question shortly thereafter.
“We did a little staycation and we were sitting in front of the fireplace and I wanted to turn a movie on and I’m feeling under the blanket for the remote and he was like, ‘Right here,’ and he puts the ring box in my hand, so I pull out my hand and I’m holding this ring box,” she recalled.
Boseman died in 2020 at the age of 43, shocking fans, who had no idea he was even sick. His widow noted that he was very intentional about keeping his health issues private.
“Chad was not a person that would have wanted to be treated any differently because people knew that he was sick,” she said. “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.”