breast cancer – Don't Gel Too Soon

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Cancer, Courage and Rage

Cancer has taken so many people I’ve loved and admired. This new interview with two hugely admired and much-loved celebrities reminded me of how deeply it affects us all . We know, in our heads, that the presence of beauty, courage, fame and an amazing marriage and family can’t keep the monster at bay. Neither can being the most respected broadcast journalist of the past 30 years; Tom Brokaw had cancer too. So did my husband, by the way. Thankfully, they are still with us. But it’s a roll of the dice, not fame or fortune, or even education, that’s made it so.

So why are we not all enraged? Why do we refuse to keep this plague at (or at least near) the top of our agenda? We face so much right now: attacks on women, racial tension, income inequality, climate change, declining education systems and infrastructure – fill in your own particular blank. But no matter how we feel about any of these issues, we all grieve for those we’ve lost to cancer; we all long for their presence in our lives and know that it is just a lack of knowledge that took them from us.

No family is untouched; the lucky ones face it among older members but so many lose loved ones — family and friends, well before they’ve seen their children grow up, or get married or find their way in the world and before they’ve exhausted the gifts that brought so much to all of us. I’ve been thinking about them a great deal recently, and have felt, for some time, a need to honor them once again here. Many died before there was an Internet but I’ve added links where I could.

We were young journalists together:

Margot Adler

Mary Halleron

Mark Harrington

Joan Shorenstein

Teachers, mentors, friends:

Maggie Morton

The Dearest:

MOTHERS WITH CANCER: SOME OF THE BRAVEST WOMEN ON THE PLANET

This is the logo from a blog called Mothers with Cancer. (We are twenty (or so) moms
fighting cancer. Some of us have been in remission for years; others
are newly diagnosed, or battling a new recurrence. All of us have
something to say.) I’ve spent much of the past week reading personal and group cancer blogs for a project and I’ve been near tears for most of that time. The sadness, the courage, the resilience in the face of multiple recurrences, the joy in small moments – there’s only so much of it you can read before you start to crumble. Then you tell yourself that they’re living what you’re reading, and, out of respect, you force yourself to go on.

In 1998 there was a big cancer March on Washington. I was around DC for much of it; because of my husband’s long-time work on prostate cancer advocacy I’ve been around cancer advocates and survivors for years. But none of that, and none of them – brought truth to the words "you’ve got cancer" the way these bloggers do, as their realities become ours. I’ve come to believe that we owe them our attention – that, as Willie Loman‘s wife Linda said: "Attention must be paid." And so it must

You’ll find many of a legion of cancer bloggers on Mothers with Cancer and many more on their individual blog rolls. I urge you to visit their sites and leave a message. They may not know us, but through their honesty — and their pain — we know them. And we can’t leave them sitting out here alone. Listen:

The truth is, I am scared. I am trying to reassure myself with the fact
that I have been feeling pretty good, that I have been biking and
running But I was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was feeling the
healthiest and most fit that I had in years. And I was diagnosed with
liver mets three weeks after I returned to work, at a time when I was
feeling strong, energetic and (so I thought) on the road to reclaiming
my life from cancer. Not Just About Cancer

Continue reading MOTHERS WITH CANCER: SOME OF THE BRAVEST WOMEN ON THE PLANET

Elizabeth Edwards Does Not Deserve This

This is a photo of Elizabeth Edwards (taken by Josh Hallett) talking to Jen Lemen a t BlogHer just over a month ago. It appears here, (aside from my high regard for both women in this photograph) because Jen’s post on that conversation is critical to what follows.

Which is that on August 27th a particularly vitriolic post about Elizabeth Edwards appeared on Silicon Valley Moms. I learned of it thanks to Emily McKhann of the wonderful Cooper and Emily of Been There and The Motherhood.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been this sad or troubled, especially by this community of women I have come to love and treasure. I was around for the days when playgroups of moms wouldn’t let their (my) kids join because they would be coming with a baby sitter, when male colleagues questioned my (necessary) decision to return to work after the birth of my first child and when, as I recalled while at a news conference there yesterday, women journalists like me WERE NOT ALLOWED into events at the National Press Club; we had to sit in the balcony.

It seems to me that this post puts us back up there – separated, this time, not from the men but from one another. I posted a comment at SVM but also share it with you here:

As usual, I’m late to the conversation but I have to tell you I am
shocked and saddened (how’s that for original?) Women have been kept at
one another forever – it’s a way to drain the power of what we become
when we work together. Driven to judge one another in pursuit of
acceptance, we make it far easier to dominate us.
Rebecca, (this is an edited version of what I had originally written –
I’m trying to take my own advice) why judge another parent like that?
Particularly one with EE’s history? If you want to say "I wouldn’t do
that; I’d worry about my kids being too disrupted" or some other
conversation-starter – that would be fine. But the level of vitriol and
cruelty in this post (more powerful probably because your write so
well) sounds more like Ann Coulter than a thoughtful mommy blogger.
I read that now you have changed your mind about portions of this initial
post. That suggests to me that instead of trashing of a critically ill
parent whose kids are getting the experience of a lifetime and more
quality time with their parents than most American moms and dads can
afford to offer theirs, you had saved this post as a "draft" and waited
a couple of hours to be sure of what you wanted to say, you would have been grateful for the chance to rethink before you published.
Did you read Jenn Lemon’s piece http://www.jenlemen.com/blog/?p=214
about her conversation with Ms. Edwards at BlogHer? EVERYONE — did
you? It’s here – and helps to clarify why so many readers felt such
deep pain reading this SVM post. She’s a remarkable woman
dealing with an unimaginable situation with grace and love.
These issues will always provoke strong feelings – the question is not
whether we have a right to those feelings but whether we have a right
to judge so harshly those who might choose lives different from our own.[NOTE: SPELLING CORRECTED 9/17]

OK that’s my speech on the subject. It’s just such a shame – OH – and take a look, if you go to SVM, at Ms. Edwards’ initial response (it’s magnificent)as well as her very classy second one this morning.