What lies beneath

629 run (by me)

204 miles donated

I’m back on the road.   No more than 3 or 4 miles at a time yet, and only a few times a week, it is with the help of a special brace that lifts my tissue expander up off of my ribcage, but I’m out there.   

*****

Someone recently asked, “Have you looked up your parents on Google?  It’s scary.”

I hadn’t.  My parents have been gone for a while now, my dad before Google even existed (that really was a time kids, a time before Google existed…”)  So I decided to Google my mom. 

It took only a Google moment before she turned up.  It was a pretty flowery summation and I barely recognized her in it, which was strange, because I was the author.  It was her obituary. 

I was out of town the night mom died in a car crash.  My friends had mobilized and by the time I got home, there was a pile of freshly dry cleaned, funeral appropriate black dresses, a package of airplane snacks for the kids to dive into on our travel day to Virginia, a necklace for me: delicate gold chain with a tiny angel charm attached, and finally, the stack of newspapers that had collected while we were away for the weekend. 

I saw the papers and realized that there would be obituaries in those papers and that I needed to study to see what an obit looked like.  I wanted to write my mom’s properly.  I read through several, thought carefully and wrote.

I pulled together a short piece about the travelling she’d done, her motherhood and her love of reading; I listed the people she’d left behind.  It looked far too flowery as I read it now six years later, but I thought looked good at the time.  Still, as I sat at my desk and read over it, I barely recognized her.  I had hit highlights that sounded good, like the rest of obituaries I read.  

There was no room to say that that she was preternaturally scared of homelessness; that she liked to drive us to the beach to play during rainstorms, that she could frustrate me to the point of tears, that she was an inspired but terrible cook, a brilliant scientist and that she wore Chanel No. 22.  Not 5.

To be fair, an obit is not the place to explore the depths of a person.  At best, they are shock laden, bittersweet summaries; more often they are simply demure announcements of demise. But it is the inelegant details of a life that define us, that make us who we actually are in the world, how we relate, what make us interesting.  I’m willing to bet that if the obituaries were turned into a page where each person was given a paragraph dedicated to tiny details of a life – not just the pretty ones, but the ones we are most afraid of admitting, it would be the most read part of a newspaper. 

I got an email from a friend last week.  We share a dear friend who connected us when I was diagnosed.  She’s written me several letters in the past couple of months, lifting me up, holding me tight.  In the last email, she wrote “I have a present for you--well, sort of a present. I'm going to send you my SCAR picture. It's funny, though, because I really don't like it at all. I think I mentioned that I feel kind of "drag-queeny" in the photo. Still, the message behind the photo is the only thing that matters, really. It's about showing the true reality of the big BC.”

The SCAR project http://www.thescarproject.org/ is a breathtaking collection of photographs of young women who have undergone all forms of surgery for breast cancer.  The striking thing about these pictures is how honest they are.  They are nude, there is no hiding the scars, there is no hiding at all.

There is a ferocity in standing tall with that vulnerability.  There is no neat summation for the fear and need and hope and utter unknown in the diagnosis of any kind of cancer.  There is no way to make it pretty; it calls for the deepest kind of courage and ability to tamp down terror.  A friend wrote me yesterday, told me that she too was just diagnosed with breast cancer and wondered what the FUCK was in the water?  I liked her rage, it rang true. 

We all live our lives full of rage and fault and desire, full of miscalculation and stubborn pride and good intention.   We all have a tender underbelly that we try to shield - with humor, with bravado, with a façade of courage.  Try as we might to be endlessly gracious and funny and sparkly, we all have the soft underbelly, we all have the stuff we don’t want to be included in the neat summary of our lives, or even the everyday picture of what we want to look like.  But it is there in that tender spot, mixed in with our tempers and insecurities and failures and secrets and scars that we are most wholly human.  

It is there in that sacred, terrifying space that we can access and offer and reconcile with the truest parts of ourselves.  It's where the most powerful potential for greatness exists.