Tag Archives: breast-cancer

Finding Womanhood

Posted on by under Gender & Place

Dr. Tauer’s appointment schedule is shot. I wait with moist hands, survey the exam room, focus on dirt accumulated on the baseboards, and glance at the Holy Bible placed on a nearby table next to pamphlets arranged like a deck of cards. Women wearing colorful head scarves and wigs are on the cover of a small catalog. An anatomic chart shows a frontal view and cross-section of a woman’s healthy breast: nipple, milk ducts, fatty tissue, and muscle. I cup my right breast, still tender from recent surgery. I nursed my babies. This wasn’t supposed to happen. So much for statistics…

Dr. Tauer knuckle-taps the door, steps inside, and sits on a low stool; knees touch knees, warm hands cover cold hands.

“This isn’t going to be easy,” he says. “But you are healthy.”

Other than having cancer, I think. I appreciate his compassion, but I just want to get on with things. I want to go home.

“When you come in for your first treatment next week,” he continues, “you’ll have labs done first, and then on to the chemo room…” I knew all this from being a nurse, so I sort of tuned out. “…and you’ll have side effects…”

Yes, get on with it. I want to go home…

“…and you will lose your hair.”

I zero in on his Brooks Brothers tie, dotted in navy, knotted even and tidy.

“Love your tie,” I say, as he glances at my life on his computer.

*   *   *   *   *

I bring my face close to the bathroom mirror. My eyebrows are my best feature: low maintenance, nicely arched, no rogue hairs, no sparse areas to fill in like old ladies do with unsteady hands, drawing wobbly, thick lines in Maybelline black.

Faint lines radiate from the skin around my eyes. I smile and the lines squint and deepen, but they aren’t too bad. Given the circumstances, I’m looking pretty good. A woman’s neck gives away her age, but mine is still smooth with just a little droop under the chin. Nothing that a dab of moisturizer won’t hide.

I raise my shoulders, take a deep breath, and pick up the expensive hair brush I bought a couple of months ago at a salon. I attack my scalp, brushing hard. Harder. Thin strands gather in the bristles.

After dividing my hair into sections, I pull each section taut, cut 2-3 inches, moving from section to section. Angry, curt scissors clip, blade against blonde. Swatches drop in the sink. Laying the scissors aside, I inspect my work in the mirror.

I look like Cate Blanchett when she played Queen Elizabeth and chopped off her hair.

No, I look like someone with a very bad haircut...

“Honey, I’m through with the preliminaries,” I call to my husband, Tom. “Just wait ‘til you see step one to a hair-free life.” I put my hands over my face and peek through my fingers as he walks into the bathroom. Dropping my hands, I burrow my face into his chest.

Leaning over the sink, I stare at the shiny drain stopper. My husband guides his whirring beard trimmer over my scalp. Dark stubble from my roots scatters on creamy porcelain.

I hope my head is a pretty shape, without too many knots. Daddy always called me a knot-head.

The whirring stops. I raise my head and look up at Tom. His eyes are edged with tears.

*   *   *   *   *

I crawl into bed shy and tentative, like a bride on her wedding night. Will my lover touch me? Will I please him? Even though the rest of my body is covered with cotton and lace, baldness imparts a feeling of nakedness. I turn on my side away from him, clutching the corner of our quilt, trembling. He pulls me in close and strokes my bare head as he would if my blond tresses were spilling over his hands.

*   *   *   *   *

I sit around a table with five other women going through various stages of cancer treatment. Scarves, wigs, and hats reflect our individuality. I’ve arrived bald, sparkly earrings dangling, wearing a peasant top reminiscent of the sixties, embracing a bit of a rebellious spirit I had secretly wanted when I was younger.

We talk about how we looked before our appearance was altered by the benevolent poison. Laughter and moments of silence mirror the way we feel inside. I describe my pre-cancer hair:  blown-dry, hot curlered, gelled, hairsprayed, and teased on top if humidity threatened to flatten it. Growing up–even as an adult–part of me thought a Southern woman’s identity was in her hair.

We each have our own tabletop mirror, various samples of foundation, concealer, eye shadow, blush, powder, mascara and brow pencil. Volunteers from the American Cancer Society give us tips for applying cosmetics while dealing with the visible signs of chemotherapy treatment.

I begin applying a lighter color of makeup along my jawline, blending it to match the pale color of my skin; a low red blood cell count has robbed me of rosy cheeks.

Oh, my Lord. I peer into the mirror and realize that most of one eyebrow is gone. A lone misshapen eyelash, resembling a small spider’s thin leg, is dangling from a top eyelid. Short, stubby lashes on the other eye are all that remain half-way across the top and bottom lids.

Brows, usually my best feature, have lost their arch. To create a natural look is a challenge. I pick up a pencil as though it were a paint brush and apply a light brown shade with gentle strokes. I call one of the volunteers over to help me.

775713_10152119807977952_1675942785_o(1)“I am afraid I’m going to mess up!” She chooses a darker brown, guides my hand with hers, and we apply it carefully, a light touch to avoid an obvious line. With only a little bit left to work with, I add as much color and beauty as possible, typical Southern woman that I am.

*   *   *   *   *

I stored my shaved hair in a Ziplock bag and tucked it away in an old cookie tin, my treasure box, to keep it as a remembrance. Every now and then, I take the tin down from a shelf in my bedroom’s wardrobe and look at the hair that was scattered in the sink on that day when I felt bereft of femininity.

I imagine someday sitting on the side of my bed next to a granddaughter with the treasure box resting on her lap. Perhaps she will lift the lid and giggle or gasp when she spies the baggie. I will tell her why I kept it, my story of hair lost, but life gained, strengthened by God, family, and friends.

I will run my fingers through her baby-fine hair and hope she’ll grow into a strong woman like me.

*   *   *   *   *

The black-and-white photo of Lisa, above, is by Cellar Door Photography, Memphis, TN.

Lisa bio YAH

The Mourning House

Posted on by under Guest, Out of Place

I currently sleep in the guest room of my house. The other room I used to sleep in—which I have been calling the “hospice room”—is now a more hallowed space. That room was redesigned just prior to death of the woman who had accompanied me through life and parenting for 27 years. We’d only been married for just over six months, due to a five-hour period during which same-sex couples were allowed to marry in Michigan. The death was unanticipated; diagnosis of advanced breast cancer, just one year earlier, had led us to believe we had “years” instead of a year to share our lives together. Once a partner, spouse, and co-parent of two daughters, I must now try on the identity of widow, while existing inside of a house that no longer feels like home.

In the hospice room, the hospital bed is gone, but there are many artifacts put in place for healing purposes. A Buddha statue from Sri Lanka donated by sister for good luck; framed photos of orchids taken by our daughter when we went to the orchid show last year; a print of the magnificent sand hill cranes whose visits to the wetlands of Michigan we witnessed every October.

When I walk through that room I see not the space where my partner and I once slept together, did our nightly roundup of the days events, and watched our favorite television shows. Once I had listened to Nancy whisper “sleep with angels, darlin’” each night before we switched off the lights. Now, I see a kind of vacuous shrine that I don’t wish to disturb.

The hospice room is artful. Our antique mahogany bed is spread with a treasured cover from Nepal, and its geometric purple and green hues are echoed in the pillows and in the lilac paint on the walls. Nancy has left many objects containing memorabilia—cigar boxes, a pewter bowl, an old candy tin. When I am brave enough to look through them, I find weathered photos of her father and grandparents in sepia, small jewelry boxes containing antique rings and pearls, the invitation to her parents’ wedding in 1950, the baby shoes of our daughters. It contains remnants of a life I once was part of.

In the guest room where I sleep, I still feel like a visitor. The room remains the same as when it housed guests, not particularly inviting and disturbingly impersonal. The colors clash: pink curtains, a blue patterned quilt, walls painted a jolting lime green. A large unadorned bed dominates the smallish room. It’s not designed for comfort or charm. But in my current uncomfortable frame of mind, it seems to fit my requirements.

A perennial basket of unfolded laundry resides in the corner of the anonymous space where I now reside. My computer, my refuge, stands ready for my use, although I still can’t find a show I want to watch or a book I want to read. Scanning Facebook, reading through emails, I seek connections to fill the stillness that stretches before me.

The rest of the house is also still alien territory, transformed by the permanent vacancy of one of its occupants. My sprightly teenaged daughter, whose easy laughter hasn’t changed much since toddlerhood, begs me to go upstairs with her at night. She will not go back downstairs again without me, spooked by a house that is devoid of her other mother. She asks me to accompany her to the bathroom at night and in the early dark mornings. She fears that Nancy is somehow here in the house as a ghost, but perhaps not as much as she fears living in a house where Nancy no longer exists.

Nancy’s mother says she cannot bear to visit us in this place, not while the painful memories of her daughter seem to bounce off every surface of the house. But my daughter and I must live in this mourning house, trying to find our way to another kind of home where we can co-exist with what is here and what is not.

 *   *   *   *   *

JuliaGrant“The Mourning House” was written by Julia Grant. Julia lives, writes, and works in higher education in East Lansing, Michigan. She and her partner, Nancy, were one of the 300+ same-sex couples who were married on March 23, 2014, in Michigan.