Afterlives: My Mother’s Breast Cancer, and My Own
BY KATE BOLICK
For most of my life, I had only one memory of my mother’s first mastectomy: On the day she returned home from the hospital, she took my little brother and me into the bathroom and lifted up her shirt. She was forty, he was six, I was ten, and the three of us looked at her reflection in the mirror rather than directly at her chest. The thick red scar where her right breast had been was a violent surprise, like a gash in an oil portrait of a mother and her children. She explained surgery, and cancer, and remission, and we asked questions. Then we all went out for pizza.
And so her illness became an everyday fact of our lives—though “illness” seems too loaded a word for a woman as healthy and vital as she was, all fresh green vegetables and swimming laps at the Y.W.C.A. three days a week. She never once made me worry, or feel afraid. My own breasts were just starting to develop, however, and, as puberty molded me into her same shape, I decided it just wasn’t possible to look and be so much like her and not also harbor the same disease. Cancer is like a secret that insists on being known.
When I was in college, I asked my mother if she believed in an afterlife, and she said no. This didn’t surprise me—she’d finished Catholic school an atheist—but it bothered me. I reasoned with her: “None of us can say for certain there’s no life after death because we’re still alive,” and, “What if there is an afterlife and, by refusing to believe in it, you lose your right to send signs from beyond the grave?” and, “How about this: let’s just agree to agree that there is an afterlife, and if there is, when one of us dies, we can send signs, and if there isn’t that’s that. But at least we’ll have the option.” She laughed and said no, thank you.
A year later, after her cancer had reëmerged and killed her more swiftly than we’d ever thought possible, I thought of this conversation often, and was annoyed. Thanks for leaving me alone in this cold, echoing void, Mom. Would it have hurt her to humor me? To at least be on the lookout for signs from beyond would have been a comfort. I envied people who deluded themselves by visiting mediums or psychics, and I bridled at those who said my mother was “watching over” me. Maybe other mothers did such a thing, but not mine.
In my thirties, I developed the habit of returning home at least once a year and working out of my mother’s office on the second floor, which remained entirely as she’d left it. When she was alive, I’d had no interest in journalism, and now here I was, writing for magazines and newspapers, exactly where she had. My father eventually dismantled her bulky first-generation PC and put the hard drive in the closet, but her desk, an old wooden door laid across two metal filing cabinets heavy with hanging file folders, didn’t budge. All I had to do to spend hours in her company was open a drawer.
And yet I never did. In 2012, when I started writing my first book, “Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own,” I spent the entire summer in that office. Every morning I’d walk upstairs with a mug of coffee and sit down at that makeshift desk; never once was I tempted to open a drawer. When I needed to confirm a factual detail about her life, I’d e-mail and call her brothers and friends, as if the answers weren’t already there, at knee level.
I told myself that this was what resistance felt like. If I opened one of the drawers, something like her soul might slip out, and then I’d have nothing of her left. It was frightfully easy to imagine her on that last just-another-workday morning, finishing up a reporting call, dropping her notes into a folder, suddenly realizing she was running late, shoving the drawer shut, grabbing her purse, and driving into Boston for a routine doctor’s appointment, never to return. Her descent was so abrupt. How many articles did she abandon mid-draft? Did anyone call her editors to explain what had happened? She died too soon, hadn’t had time to hit her stride, to create something that would endure. Those files didn’t merely contain the last gasp of her living spirit—they were graveyards of journalistic ephemera, tragic monuments to all she’d never achieved, and in this way a cautionary tale, a physical reminder of what would happen if I didn’t hurry up and get my life in motion and make use of however much time I had remaining.
My first thought when the surgeon told me I had breast cancer was, Of course. I finally wrote a book. Now I die.
That sounds far more dramatic than I felt. When I turned thirty-nine without receiving my own diagnosis, then forty, then forty-one, I’d grown uneasy. Had I been crazy all this time? Was I actually going to skate through life evading the dreaded C?
But I had to wait only one more year. On that bright, cold afternoon in December, 2014, I was primarily relieved: this particular shoe had finally dropped. I watched the surgeon very closely to make sure I caught everything he said with his words and his face. His blue eyes narrowed in an expression that demanded I pay attention: “This is the best cancer you could have. Stage 1A. Tiny tumor. Very responsive to treatment. You are not going to die from this. You should thank your body for being so good to you.”
I scribbled his words in my notebook. Then I stopped.
“I am not going to die from this,” I said.
“You are not going to die from this,” he said.
In January, he wheeled me into an operating room, and I was put under general anesthesia. First, he made an incision in my left areola, tunnelled down to nearly my rib cage, and removed the malignant tumor. Then he cut into my armpit and retrieved three lymph nodes to confirm that the cancer hadn’t spread. When the surgery was over, I took a cab home to Brooklyn. Two friends came over with takeout.
It was the follow-up consultation, in February, that caught me off guard. Before treatment could be determined, the surgeon explained, I needed to be tested for the BRCA mutation, a genetic anomaly that can impair a body’s ability to suppress tumors. If I had it, a double mastectomy was advised.
I’d never doubted that I had the mutation.
“Doctor!” I said. “I don’t have time for an amputation!”
I was joking, but not really. The initial irony of dying just as my first book came out had seemed grimly appropriate, and frankly much easier. This more concrete likelihood of getting both of my breasts removed as publication day neared was like sprinting head first into an oncoming train. How could these two things happen simultaneously?
But, on March 11th, I learned I don’t have the BRCA mutation.
On March 16th, I began seven weeks of daily radiation.
On April 21st, “Spinster” was published, and I paused radiation to go on book tour.
On May 11th, it was over.
Three months later, in August, while home visiting my father, I walked upstairs to my mother’s office, crossed the room, and, before I knew what I was doing, grabbed the handle of one of her filing cabinets. The drawer slid open, the first time in nineteen years.
My eyes immediately landed on a folder labelled MASTECTOMY, which I recognized as a freelancer’s catchall: notes, drafts, research, pathology reports. Confronted by the evidence, I suddenly remembered that, two years after my mother’s first mastectomy, she’d written about it for Boston magazine.
I brought the folder to the armchair and cringed to think of why I’d forgotten this essay: when I was in college and my mother had tried to share her work with me, I’d privately dismissed the subjects she covered, such as breast cancer and divorce, as frivolous “women’s journalism”—the sort of writing that I, a poet in the making, was above. I’d responded arrogantly, and in the ensuing years had pushed the exchange—and the essay—out of mind.
There was a stapled photocopy of the article, “Diagnosis: Malignant,” published in July, 1985. Almost everything I read was news to me. Turns out she was thirty-seven when she first felt the lump in her breast. She made an appointment with her local doctor, who passed it off as nothing, and continued to say it was nothing for two years—even though it kept getting bigger. It was her dear friend Maureen who urged her to see a specialist in Boston. He took one look, decided the lump was a malignant tumor that had been growing for nearly a decade, and scheduled her to come back in ten days for a biopsy.
She was terrified, and rightly so, given the severity of her diagnosis and the probable outcome. “Those 10 days in limbo waiting for the biopsy were the worst,” she wrote. “The terror gnawed at my stomach; macabre fingers of fear squeezed my neck. Surprisingly, I didn’t dream of dying, but my conscious mind hardly gave me a break. I felt like Wile E. Coyote in the old Saturday morning ‘Road Runner’ cartoons, blissfully unaware that he’s run off the cliff until he looks down at the canyon yawning below his whirling feet.”
I learned that in 1983 it was still common for a woman to be admitted to the hospital for a biopsy, wait there for the results, and then undergo the surgery—in her case, a nearly two-week ordeal. The folder held a typewritten letter: apparently suspecting that she’d be away for a while, she had supplied a note to my father reminding him which days to pick up my brother and me from play rehearsal or soccer practice, and not to forget our Tuesday-night treat of one TV show.
She underwent chemotherapy for fifty-seven weeks. She lost her hair in big, furry clumps but refused to wear a wig, because doing so felt too much like giving in. She continued working and seeing friends and swimming laps at the Y. Overall, she reported feeling almost lucky. “I don’t go around town shouting about the virtues of cancer,” she wrote, “but I do believe that dealing with death as an immediate possibility, rather than as a phantom terror, has enriched me. . . . Contracting cancer certainly won’t make you like it, but assuming that you work through the pain and come out intact—or partially intact—as I did, you realize that the lessons cloaked in fear are the invaluable ones that most people simply don’t learn. Cancer taught me much more about life than it did about death, although I learned a lot about that, too.”
The mid-eighties were still the early years of what’s now known as breast-cancer awareness, when women were newly speaking openly about what had long been treated as a shameful condition, and seeking a sort of sisterhood. (The now-ubiquitous pink-ribbon campaign launched in 1991.) Hardly the frivolous “women’s journalism” I’d once dismissed it as being, her article was a crucial step in this process. Breast cancer is not a feminist disease, just as not all spinsters are feminists (as people sometimes ask me), but, because centuries of patriarchy have distorted every aspect of the female experience, both feminism and breast cancer were stigmatized and misunderstood until radical nineteen-seventies activists made them political issues.
This doesn’t mean one needs to be radical, or an activist, to be a feminist, of course. Feminism is an ecosystem of ideas that relies on a diversity of temperaments to be generated and disseminated. There are brazen trailblazers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who galvanized audiences by lecturing tirelessly on equal rights. There are solitary geniuses like Maeve Brennan, who, in co-opting the male tradition of the urban flaneur, gave voice to the experience of being a woman alone when marriage rates were at their highest (all without once identifying herself as a feminist). There are small-town freelance journalists, like my mother, who carried the torch lit by crusaders into the mainstream by writing about breast cancer for popular magazines; combined, their efforts brought the disease the public attention and research funding it had long been denied.
When I finished reading the Xerox, a new memory reared up: after that first mastectomy, my mother became something of a one-woman hotline for the similarly afflicted. Sometimes I’d come home from school to find her comforting a stranger in a headscarf over a pot of tea. I pictured a gum wrapper with her name and number in smudged pencil being passed from one suburban patient to the next. It wasn’t some ideal of female saintliness that motivated her—she had nothing but contempt for the holy fairy tales of her Catholic youth—but the unshakable conviction that talking is transformative, that, save for death itself, everything is improved with honest conversation, whether in person or on the page.
For the first decade after her death, I wore my mother’s rings and never removed them. One was too big, and I worried constantly that it would slip off my finger and be lost forever. Finally, it did. I returned home from shopping at a vintage-clothing boutique and realized it was gone; rather than call the store and ask if they’d found it, I decided to let it go. It was time I stopped constantly reminding myself that I’d lost her.
My mother’s fate wasn’t mine after all, genetically or sociologically. Just as I’d once been wrong to believe that I needed what she had—marriage, children—to find meaning and be happy, I was wrong to think myself her biological clone. I really am my own woman, apart from her. More crucially, I’d inherited a world that she’d had a part in making.
I still believe that my mother had much more left to do, but, reading her essay, I understood that she’d already done important work—for women in general, and for me personally. Thirty years later, I’d go in for my annual mammogram, and a series of highly sophisticated MRI and ultrasound tests would detect the presence of a minuscule malignancy lurking at the very bottom of my breast. While a team of doctors analyzed these results, I’d wait in the lobby tweeting with acquaintances about “breast pancakes” (each breast is flattened between two plates) and “those weird pastie things for nipples”—a long way from the days when a woman was sent home to worry alone about a lump she could both see and touch. By expanding the conversation around breast cancer, my mother had done much more for me than send those signs from beyond that I’d once craved.
During my own first brush with cancer, I’d been surprised and relieved to find myself thinking that, were I to die right now, I wouldn’t mind too much, because at least I’d finally made my life the way I wanted it. Maybe it took me so long to open a drawer because I couldn’t risk discovering that my mother had, after all, achieved her ambitions; if I did, I’d lose the drive to achieve my own. Or maybe I just needed to show myself that I could stand without her before I could admit that she’d been there all along.
This piece was drawn from the afterword to the paperback edition of “Spinster,” by Kate Bolick, which is out April 19th from Broadway Books.
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