My buzz cut received second glances in the Blue Room cinema, in an affluent suburb of Brisbane, but familiar greetings in alternative cafés.
Six months on from the mastectomy I was part of a media awareness campaign on breast cancer and, I realised, the feminising of oneself again. The very thing I thought I’d escaped the desire for.
Through the Choices support program, hair care manufacturer Nak provided three women with free natural hair extensions, hair dye and cuts for a year. The Today morning show on Channel 9 ran a three-minute interview with us about the impact of losing hair from breast cancer treatment. The segment was called ‘Hair Hope’. I walked out that day with a Kristen Stewart version of Joan Jett on my head. Robin Bailey, a radio personality, did before and after interviews for Think Pink Week, which raised money for the Choices program. Once the hair extensions came out I had a Japanese anime femme fatale look: ragged, short fringe, and straight, dragged-through-a-hedge-backwards sides. My hair gave off an edge of cool I didn’t feel.
People responded to how I looked post-cancer. They also responded to the fact of my cancer. It appeared that both of these things unearthed deep fears of their own death. I was drawn to Joan Didion’s reflections on this phenomenon in The Year of Magical Thinking. She wrote:
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.
How people reacted to my cancer news has made me think there is a need for cancer etiquette now that so many people are diagnosed with it. That people should be careful what they say. Like when you’re pregnant: for some reason the bump opens up the Pandora’s box of hellish birth stories that passing acquaintances must tell you about. Ditto cancer.
One day at Celso’s playgroup I stood watching him playing around a tunnel in a jungle gym. He was contemplating going through it – head in, then out, squirm halfway in, then squirm out. The week before I’d made a pitch for The Ride to Conquer Cancer: a 200-kilometre ride over two days to raise funds for the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute. My team, Breast Friends for a Cure, were raising funds. After announcing this, of course, I was the go-to person to discuss cancer with. This was fine by me. Though on this day I was left smiling with amusement from the sheer verbal battering.
You had breast cancer? a mother asked.
Yes.
Did you have a mastectomy?
Yes, both breasts, I replied, pointing to my reconstructed breasts.
I got a text this morning that my friend’s wife died last night from breast cancer.
Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.
She was young like you. It was aggressive and she died really quickly.
Words jangled in my mouth but I didn’t spit any out. Hmm … I kept my eyes straight ahead on Celso at the top of the slide, now in full sun.
On my way out of the playgroup a volunteer assistant stopped me to ask if I’d seen the show on TV the night before about a mother’s breast cancer experience.
I was about to tell him I didn’t have a TV in my living room, but instead said, No, I didn’t.
I heard it was really good. It was called ‘My Breasts Could Kill Me’.
By this stage I wanted to raise my hands in the air, look up to the sky and yell, Listen to what you are saying, people.
In the same week I was bombarded at playgroup, a close family friend tried to reassure me: Celso would be taken care of if God forbid you weren’t around.
I wished to face my own mortality alone, without others openly addressing their passing thoughts on my death. The late writer Christopher Hitchens in his regular Vanity Fair column expressed similar confrontations. One in particular made me in turn laugh then grimace.
An elderly woman approaches him at a book signing and relays how her cousin had liver cancer, which went away then returned more aggressively. Christopher Hitchens does his public-school English cough and turns on his charming self to offer his condolences.
She fails to feel the many eyes on her head wishing her to move away and relays how her cousin died alone and in agony – oh, and that he was a homosexual his whole life. She concludes with the unthoughtful words of, I know exactly how you feel, which of course she never could.
In Hitchens’s piece he makes the argument that ground rules for interactions between people from Tumortown and Wellville are needed, especially as more and more people are inhabiting that other place.
Joan Didion turned to Emily Post’s seminal book on etiquette for advice around grief and how people ought to respond to the grief-stricken:
Persons under the shock of genuine affliction are not only upset mentally but are all unbalanced
