Amanda Somerville has written to the people who follow her. Three weeks after her husband Sander Gommans made the diagnosis public, the singer has given it its name: diffuse midline glioma, found on 8 September, aggressive, cancerous and not operable.
She is blunt about what that means. The tumour, she writes, is only treated to gain time. She is on radiation and chemotherapy in Germany, Gommans is with her through it, and she says she will not pretend it is not serious, because it is. She also says her doctors are good and that they are pursuing every option, including newer treatments that give them real reason to hope.
The apology in her message is the part that will stay with people. She is sorry it took her this long to speak directly, she writes, because the past weeks were a blur of hospitals, scans, biopsies and difficult conversations, and she needed to understand what they were facing before she could find words for it. She has three young daughters, and being able to function for them came first.
Her work runs through a great deal of European metal without ever being filed under one band. Trillium is her own, Kiske/Somerville is shared with Michael Kiske of Helloween, and her voice and her vocal coaching sit behind records by many more. She asked for nothing in the message except that people keep carrying her.