When ‘get well soon’ doesn’t cut it

Then in 2011, McDowell’s college roommate Amy was diagnosed with cancer and died three months later, at the age of 34. “Nobody knew what to say,” McDowell recalled. “Nobody knew what to do. Culturally, we are so ill-equipped to have these conversations. To even show up in the most basic of ways when there is so much fear around illness. And so I saw it again from the perspective of not being the sick person, but being the friend.”

How inspiration came from tragedy

Amy’s death was a clarifying moment for McDowell, who left her job and started writing and designing the kinds of sympathy cards that she wished she had received when she was ill.

“I realised that having the experience of a friend being sick, combined with what I had been through, gave me a perspective that allowed me to talk about illness in a different way that could help other people,” McDowell said.

“When I was doing my treatment, if you had said to me that I would do anything with cancer for my career, even in a peripheral way, I would have said, ‘No way. I’m leaving this behind, it’s not part of my identity, I’m done with this.’ I didn’t have any perspective yet. That comes with time and distance.”

In 2015, she released a series of refreshingly direct, often irreverent Empathy Cards with relatable, human-centered designs and a mission to help us talk about illness.

Some cards are spirited rebukes to clichés such as “laughter is the best medicine”, the notion that someone’s illness is “God’s plan”, or that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Others offer moral support for those who have endured hearing about one too many internet cures, had their battle with serious illness described as a “journey” or been lobbied on the supposedly miraculous healing powers of kale. McDowell’s late friend Amy’s husband challenged her to write a card for someone who knows they are dying. Her top-selling card is one with black lettering on a white background that simply reads: “There is no good card for this”.

Touching thousands of lives

Since launching the ongoing series, McDowell has been contacted by thousands of people.

“Half of the people who write to us have been ill or lost someone and are saying, ‘Thank you for making something that makes me feel seen and heard, like someone gets it, like I’m not crazy, like the things that I’m experiencing are real things.’” McDowell said. “The other half are like, ‘Thank you for helping me connect with the person who was going through the thing; the cards helped me figure out what to say or made us laugh.’”

Many people have written asking her to make cards for their own specific illness. “A lot of people were like, ‘I have Crohn’s disease and I need you to make a card about Crohn’s disease,’” McDowell said. “I could have become the card brand for every illness, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. It was hard to balance and say no, and say, ‘I’m sorry, this is important and I recognise that it’s important, but we aren’t the people to make this.’”

Instead, McDowell has sought to make cards that are specific enough to be emotionally powerful but broad enough to apply to the largest number of situations. So rather than making a card for Crohn’s disease, McDowell made a more universal chronic illness card that acknowledges the pain of invisible illness.

McDowell said she has also heard from scores of doctors, nurses, psychologists and other medical professionals who have bought the cards to give to their patients.

“I have friends who have been to med school and are teaching residents now,” McDowell said, “and they get one class in bedside manner. You would think doctors would know how to talk about this stuff, but they don’t unless they’ve learned it on their own.”

McDowell said she is surprised that the Empathy Cards have caught on not only in English-speaking countries such as the US, Ireland, South Africa and the UK (where they now have local distribution) but also in non-native-English-speaking locales, including Israel and the Netherlands.

“When the cards came out, I wasn’t thinking of them as a cross-cultural thing,” McDowell said. “I was really surprised by how pervasive this problem is – that we just don’t know how to talk about illness.”