my grandmother's left breast

October has been breast cancer awareness month. My favorite local independent coffee purveyors has run a special of a raspberry mocha latte. It comes with pink whipped cream on top, and some percentage of the sales goes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Pink abounds here in Gotham—on wristbands, on posters, on lattes—to raise money and awareness of this serious disease that affects around 200,000 Americans a year.

My grandmother had breast cancer in the late 1950s. It was just one flavor of an extended buffet of cancer that my grandmother suffered; she had skin cancer too, due to being treated with radiation for her acne in the twenties. She’d had part of her nose and part of her lips removed because of cancer. In that operation, she’d had skin drawn up from her chest like a sheet, like Bazooka Joe’s turtleneck, to provide tissue for the graft that would replace the cancerous skin she lost.

My grandmother would, after that skin cancer, retain a vampiric pallor. She eschewed the sun, hiding her face under giant bonnets and her body in long-sleeved garments, even in summer. She would apply her blood-red lipstick with a little brush that rotated magically out a slender gold cylinder. She always felt self-conscious about her loss of lips. The vermillion, she would say, cannot be replaced, and then she would close her compact with a snap. (She would be pleased to know that now it can. Now they replace the red of the lips—the vermillion—with other mucous membranes, It helps patients to be a girl, for doctors just replace one set of lips with the other.)

When my youngest uncle was around eight, and about four years before I was born, my grandmother found out that she had breast cancer. In those days, a radical mastectomy was spectacularly radical. Not only did oncologists remove the breast in its entirety, but they also removed the pectoral muscle underneath it.

When I was a child, my grandmother had waist-length hair that she would wind into a mysterious French twist with the aid of a couple of dozen hairpins and a bookcase. The pins were necessary to secure her long hair into its inside out and upside down place. The bookcase was necessary for her to prop up her left elbow while she did it. Having lost her pectoral muscle, she couldn’t raise her own arm long enough to complete her complex hirsute ministrations, and she found the shelf on the bookcase my grandfather had built the correct height.

I had known from a very young age about my grandmother’s cancer operations, just as I had known about how my grandfather had had Scarlet fever and it had led to his partial loss of hearing. My family was medically inclined, and we discussed every disease in explicit terms. There was no sugar-coating of illness or of bodily processes. We did not believe in euphemism.

I had held my grandmother’s prosthetic bras and wondered at them, as I had held her tiny lipstick brush. They seemed both alien, because of the specificity of their purpose, and familiar, because they smelled like my grandmother, or she like them. In any case, she and they were inseparable in my young mind. It was all powdery smelling like the Heaven Scent in her bathroom.

When I was twelve, my grandfather first left my grandmother, took up with another woman, filed for separation, and then killed himself. It wasn’t an easy sequence of events for anyone. It was made more complicated for everyone because it was during this time that I hit puberty. Plus my mom was pregnant with my sister. It was a black comedy of the cycle of life, really, and it was the first time I saw my grandmother, always a tower of
strength and one of the few solid centers to my world, was rocked, shaken and stirred.

My grandmother grieved for a long time after my grandfather hung himself. I imagine she grieved for him, but she also no doubt grieved for her life that was now unutterably changed, the years she’d spent with him in tight-lipped stoicism, the choices she’d made for so long, and her youth that she had not misspent in the slightest. When she finished grieving, which meant that she no longer arranged her work schedule around watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood wrapped in a cardigan with a wadded Kleenex in her hand, she cut her hair and got a life.

She discovered she liked dancing, or rediscovered it, anyway. She found out she liked strawberry daiquiris. She expanded her bedroom and had a hot tub put in it. She went hot-air ballooning. She joined groups, like Parents Without Partners, and she started dating. We would, in my late teens, arrive at my grandmother’s house and find a hand-lettered sign on a rectangle of pantyhose cardboard warning us that she had a “visitor.” She dated men younger than her 60-something.

She told a story that she was making out with a new boyfriend. She whispered to him that one of her breasts was prosthetic. Not missing a make-out beat he replied, “Just tell me which one, and I’ll concentrate on the other.” She was delighted.

When I was 21, my grandmother had a series of heart problems. At first, she had a heart attack, and this precipitated an open-heart surgery. My mother was white-lipped with the stress, but I took it in stride. I called my grandmother in the hospital and asked her what she would want me to bring her. She told me that she wanted some copies of Playboy and Penthouse because she “wanted to see girls with whole bodies.” I didn’t really understand her request, but I complied.

I bought them, and I felt happy that I could do something for her that my mother could not. It was, apparently, inappropriate to ask one’s daughter to bring porn to you in the hospital, though it was equally appropriate to ask one’s granddaughter, or to ask me at any rate, and so I did bring the magazines, demurely shrouded in a brown paper wrapper.

It was, that visit, there in the yellowy-lit hospital room, the one and only time I ever saw my grandmother’s mastectomy scars. My grandmother, looking very frail and small on her big bed, asked me to rub cocoa butter on her  new scar from her open-heart surgery. She slowly peeled down her hospital johnny, revealing her angry red vertical incision that divided a white flat expanse of chest on her left from a breast that looked a lot like my mom’s breasts on her right.

I’d always had a fear/fascination with that missing breast. Like the way that Freud’s uncanny draws a person in with its inescapable misplacement, I was a girl equally drawn in and repelled by that space. As it turned out, it was…nothing. Just skin. And not scary. Just skin.

I spread the cocoa butter on the scar, chatted for a while with my grandmother, and left to go do something I undoubtedly then felt was infinitely more important, though now I don’t recall what it was.

A few months later, my grandmother died from a stroke. After her death, we found a giant dildo wrapped in a Chivas Regal bag under a pile of her Orlon cardigans. We also found a packet of every drawing, every book I’d written, every card and every letter, bound carefully together with a piece of string. I don’t know what happened to either the dildo or the packet.

My grandmother taught me many things, many too many to enumerate here, and many too tiny and trite to mention. Some things she did teach me, and they weren’t things she intended to teach me, are that beauty is where you find it, that joy is when you make it, and that pleasure, especially physical pleasure, is a basic human right.

And that bodies, conventionally whole or interestingly missing, are nothing to fear.

Comments

[engrailed]

What a terrific post. Many of the women on my mother's side of the family have experienced breast cancer; it's difficult for us to talk about and it shouldn't be. Thank you for the positive view, and for your writing of it which is so lovely I had to work at not crying.

[Semi-Celibate Man]

Thank you that story. A beautiful and rare and generous and meaningful story, and a lovely tribute to your grandmother.

[Semi-Celibate Man]

Another thought, not meaning to be trite. Susan Komen lived and died a short distance from my home. Her sister, apparently a very capable woman in her own right, started the race and the fund in her honor. It's amazing how it's grown and impacted so many. Kudos to the sister.

[MJ]

I just adore you, and your writing. The courage to be yourself, and to write about your Grandmother's Chivas bag...please don't ever stop blogging.

[efg]

CG,

thank you... you continue to amaze me. I see October in a whole new light.

[Autumn]

How wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

[Danielle]

"And that bodies, conventionally whole or interestingly missing, are nothing to fear."

I think this quote will stick with me until the day I die. Thank you.

Much love.

[liese]

my grandmother, too, lost a breast to cancer.. and i remember the same awe and fear and and fascination with her prosthetic. years later, the radiation she was treated with reared its ugly head in the form of skin cancer, which took her life. my grandmother was not nearly as colorful as yours, but no doctor could take her family or her nightly genesee away. here's to grandmothers!

[Jonathan]

While on the subject of breast cancer awareness, I was volunteered/pressganged into taking part in a 5 km charity run on Boxing day in aid of Breakthrough - I have to run 5km in full Santa costume...

[Viviane]

It's writing like this that alternately makes me laugh, then tear up a little.

Here's to 'hyper-hormonal, pre-menopausal, over-educated skanks.'

[Anne Elizabeth]

That was a beautiful post, Chelsea. Thank you for sharing so poignantly, and making a scary thing less so.

Sincerely,
Anne Elizabeth

[aag]

Absolutely beautiful. Thank you.

[S.P.]

A good friend went through breast cancer and single mastectomy, which apparently added the final straw to the camel's back of her sad marriage. I helped her through the aftermath, and we eventually became lovers for a short, wonderful year. However, those first few times, she was so ashamed of her appearance that it was difficult to draw her out -- until I somehow convinced her that the scar didn't matter one whit, that she WASN'T "disfigured," and the only thing that mattered was that she was still here... And her subsequent personal and erotic blossoming was a delight to share, culminating with a rose branch tattoo embellishing her scar, with a small eye with a teardrop in the corner.

Bravo to your grandmother, CG... and to you, again.