I met Heather at The Little Fig Bakery in Longmont on day 14 of the One Million Faces Project. The photos and her story remains some of the most poignant, iconic moments I have ever witnessed. She shared her messages, with poise, and resolve. Heather had a stack of her new sassy mom magazine, Get Born in one hand a sweet shy little girl peeked out from behind her. She walked up to me and stated "Hi, I'm Heather I'm a mother of 4 young girls, I'm the editor of a new sassy magazine, and I want to do a topless photo, I'm a stage 4 cancer survivor I have nothing to hide."
These photographs document a sliver of my story. They’re mere moments in the expansive consumption of my days since cancer hijacked my hope. Sometimes there is an hour, occasionally even a day of joy, but the cloud of stolen innocence—the expectation for a different life than the one I’ve come to live—remains. I still had some innocence when my youngest daughter accompanied me to a little bakery in north Longmont, Colorado, where Peggy Dyer first photographed us. Me tipping her little two-year-old self upside-down, Peggy catching her determined scrunchy face on film, the face that defined her infancy and remains a family favorite, though her growing, little girl face no longer affords us the adoration of her previous infant chub.
Evocative: this word has defined my writing, my stories, my career as a publisher and proponent of honest community, a survivor of cancer (god, I hate that word survivor—it implies that something has been survived. What’s the word for still surviving? Not yet done, never done, always still fucking dealing with the monster at my back??) My essays evoke an experience for other women knee-deep in the lost-ness that often accompanies motherhood. My personality—brash, sassy, colorful, honest to a fault—evokes laughter, sometimes embarrassment, when what I reveal in a moment of transparency makes the listener uncomfortable. My survivorship—ongoing, relentless, bold, the epitome of exhaustion—evokes pity, inspiration, grief, awe.
Me, going topless for the cause of making a statement about how this cancer wouldn’t change me, wouldn’t be my undoing. In spite of my resolve, I am undone.
But what these photos evoke in me, more than anything, is overwhelming, debilitating grief. I look at my once two-year-old clutching to my neck as tightly as the Ecuadorian monkey I owned in Ecuador, and weep bitterly for what has been taken from me, and from her. I weep as I attempt to write this and cannot continue without taking a break, because the lymphedema that has affected my right hand causes it to fall asleep, so what I want more than anything—to make my writing my career—is thwarted, too, by cancer.
What’s the point, I wonder, in evocation? Maybe the masses who promote denial via polite conversation have the better way—if it’s hard, or different, or tragic, just ignore it, paint it with blue and purple polka dots and pretend it doesn’t exist. Evocative means tears, means guttural moans of deep grief, pulled from a deeper reservoir of pain and disappointment, anger and despair than I can even begin to “handle.” Perhaps denial is the better way, because then the pain doesn’t wrap its relentless hands around my neck and squeeze, choking the hope and joy out of life.
I try. I really do. I try to look forward to coffee in the morning and 20-year-reunions with high school acquaintances-turned friends, and my kids’ cross country meets and a bike ride in the beautiful Colorado autumn chill. It usually works, and I bravely make it through weeks days months without coming undone.
Today, though, I’m undone. The photos of my daughters undo me, as they evoke their younger years, gorgeous, fresh faces against a stunning white backdrop. Augmented, unalterably changed, damaged, refashioned by a disease that neither they nor I asked for or caused. They evoke a hope I once had to not have a family so damaged that I cannot see a way again to any semblance of wholeness.
What is the point of all this
evocation, I wonder? It just makes me cry, pulled from this yawning well of
tears and days upon which I’ve put on a brave face and resolute smile. They
remind me not only of all we have suffered through—namely, a loss of a life
unaltered by the ongoing threat of death—but also of how alone I feel in this.
I am alone. Utterly alone. No one can
comprehend the fear and pain associated with wondering if I will live to see
those girls grow up. No one can fully appreciate the pain of realizing that the
partner with which you brought those girls into the world has become an enemy
of any happiness that may have been redeemed from the pain of a stolen future.
No one can feel the acute disappointment at watching as the lives of those
around you march merrily along, punctuated by quirky status updates and photos
documenting everyday happenings, while yours stagnates in an ever-revolving
door of monthly CT scans, weekly chemo infusions, daily lymphedema routines,
and hourly attempts not to succumb to the utter depression of it all.
Nonetheless, hope - the fucking
miracle that it is - arises out of the ashes of despair. Alone though I am, in
experience and the daily struggle to not drink myself to death, I am surrounded
by an indescribable wealth of friendship, beauty, support and love. Real love.
The kind that, when I talk about how alone I feel, doesn’t make that about
itself, but rather says, “Yes, you’re right. And it’s awful.” The kind of love
that assures me, even in the cavern of struggle, even when I’m at my least
loveable, I am loved. The kind of love that responds to my depressing status
updates with “you are loved beyond measure,” and even more unbelievable, is the
kind of love so encompassing that, for one second, I actually believe it. The kind of love that doesn’t eliminate the
pain or the fatigue, but makes it bearable for at least one more day.
These pictures show me that I am loved. They remind
me that the love I have given was not given in vain. They will remain so that
my daughters can see themselves in a former state, when their smiles weren’t
overshadowed by the haunted look in their eyes, when their mom’s bright smile
wasn’t eclipsed by chronic fatigue.
So they evoke a time from before:
before the endless cancer days had eroded my resolve and hope so that all that
remains is pain. They evoke children not yet completely robbed of their
innocence by a disease cruel enough to take away a childhood free from fear,
but not merciful enough to just kill me so that they can grieve and move on.
This constant grief is what is so fucking exhausting. Of course I don’t want to
die. Of course they don’t want me to die. But what kind of living is this? This waiting around for the next
news of the next scan, relieved that it’s clean but the next one is only six
weeks away. Wouldn’t it be better for them
to grieve the loss of their mother and move
on with their lives? How fair is it for them
to be in this holding pattern?
Maybe this is why men fight wars.
Because, at the end of the day, the pain of life is so excruciating that all I
want to do is punch a wall and curse out my best friend, because it’s all so
completely meaningless.
Or maybe, just maybe, the
documentation of this story, of my small sliver and all its messy, unresolved is-ness, is what will, finally, be part
of the beginning of the nail in the coffin of violent outburst in response to
senseless shit—holocausts, disease, poverty, famine. Maybe when we tell our
stories and those who read our stories see our faces and our bright hope and
deep pain, then we evoke a response
of “Me, too!” and that response creates a chain reaction of story-sharing, and
in this story sharing we find a friend where we’d first seen a stranger, a compadre where before we’d seen only an
enemy. Because once you hear my story and see my face, you’ll never see me the
same way again.
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