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Donny, 2012
“It’s so fucked up,” something I didn’t usually say, was all I could muster. My brother was dying of cancer and that’s all I had. I was trying to be cool, acting like we were talking about something, any- thing, else.
“It is,” was his response, and all he ever said to me about the disease that would eventually kill him.
I said lots of stupid things to Donny instead of talking about his reality, and he pretty much played along. Two months before his death, I told him all about my trip to Austria. “I hope to get to Salzburg one day,” he said in reply. Around the same time, he told me he took his daughters to see a movie. I said, “I don’t like children’s movies.” When he told me he was tired, I said, “Oh, yeah, I’m exhausted too,” as though it was normal, as though we were all the same level of tired as someone with stage four lung cancer.
As his illness intensified, I felt the emptiness of our conversations bearing down on me. I went to Target and bought a journal with a blurry pastel cover. I was going to list every single thing I remembered. I was going to mail it to him in New Jersey. I pictured him reading it, sadly, but I could also see him laughing over memories. I wanted him to know how much all the little things added up for me, what an effect he had on me.
The journal sits almost blank up on my third floor now. I never got a chance to finish my list. He silently slipped away before I had a chance.
~
Mary, 2008
The woman who works at the Y, running and laughing alongside the cart of toddlers being pushed through the hall, is bald, eyebrowless, wearing a turban.
Even after having three of my six siblings and several friends and acquaintances experience chemotherapy, I still feel the sneaking panic, the desire to stare or look away.
My oldest sister, Mary, has been bald for eighteen years. Most people don’t want to know you can get chemo for that long, but she has. Last July the count was 900 chemotherapy sessions. 900. She is 60 but
is often confused for an old man. She told me once there are women wearing exceptional wigs and with such skillful makeup that you would not know they have cancer. It makes you wonder about all those secret cancer people, and how most people would rather it be that way.
In contrast, Mary calls it “the power of the bald head” and has acquiesced to its occasional effectiveness.
But when you are bald, people either avoid you en- tirely, insult you, or overshare. I remember once be- ing at an event with Mary. She was winning an award, something to do with having cancer. Afterwards, I stood beside her as a line formed of well-intentioned people who wished to tell her about when they lost their hair or someone they knew who beat cancer or someone who died. One woman smiled sweetly at
my sister and said with her cute Philly accent, “Don’t worry, honey, your hair will grow back. It will be beautiful.”
That was one of the days I got a peak into what it’s like to be a bald woman.
People just can’t take women losing their hair. We would all rather not know about any of it.
~
Donny, 1990
I was surprised about his eyebrows. I never thought about eyebrows and eyelashes falling out. That night was when I learned that eyebrows are really impor- tant. Everything I knew about my brother’s face was different without his eyebrows.
Donny had a considerable red birthmark covering a large portion of his face and neck and chest. It was nothing to all of us, the family, but it was, looking back, the first of many unfair burdens he would carry in his life. People asked my mother if she burned him when he was a baby. One of my classmates in gram- mar school brought it up once in a group discussion.
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Left Unsaid
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