Saturday, September 29—-2012

I wore pink. Part 1.

Pink—it’s become the color chosen to represent a fight with or surviving breast cancer. It’s also been a color that I always found dreadful for the girliness attached to it and simply because I hated it. As a symbol, I hated it also because it reminded me of the very, very vicious disease that has, for decades, been picking my family off one by one. Not just breast cancer, of course; I have a virtual medical degree just keeping up with the diseases from which my relatives have died. But breast cancer, indeed, was among them.

It’s a fact of life, partially from having a huge family.

It hit home when my mother called me on my way home from work over a year ago and told me, with weakness shaking a voice otherwise powerful and opinionated, that she was diagnosed with breast cancer herself. In the months that followed, I jumped a plane countless times on the trek from LAX to CVG Cincinnati, read numerous books about cancer on the journeys to and from, and spent days and nights with my mom as she was operated on, bits of her removed, stuck with needles, chemotherapied, and on and on all countlessly. Medical—very medical. Very clinical. The smell of antiseptic sends me back sometimes to swabbing her sutures, to watching bags of blackness slowly drip into a port in my mother’s chest, to waiting awkwardly in a room with other cancer patients who didn’t speak to each other for fear of not seeing them again next week and knowing why.

If I were an only child, it probably would have broken me. But I am not an only child, and my brother and I switching on and off with my mom meant we both got to spend time with her; we got a break from the medications, hospitals, and heartache. 

My mom, of course, never got a break. She lost her hair, her eyebrows, and eyelashes. One never fully appreciates those things until the sweat beads from a torturous Ohio summer stream into your unprotected eyes or until the snowy winter months leave your home encased in a snowdrift, the heater barely warming your sensitive, bald head. All of this, I observed as a spectator. My mother…well, she had to survive it.

And she did, and she’s here, and we don’t talk about it a lot because we all agreed to get on with life and leave the past to the immense universal shredder. And we don’t wear pink.

Just this once, though, I decided to go backward for a minute and asked my mother’s permission. Harley Davidson, which grew on me through the years as a popular brand and company and a helluva motorcycle, needed real riders and cancer survivors to be poster girls for their Pink Line. They donate to cancer research through the proceeds of this line, and their donations may well have touched my mom’s life and my life without us even knowing it at the time. In any case, I thought, “why the hell not??”

Don’t forget to check out part 2 here: https://amyliming.wordpress.com/2022/09/17/we-wore-pink-for-breast-cancer-harley-davidson-and-my-mother/