The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care

by Anne Boyer

Although breast cancer can happen to anyone with breast tissue, women bear the substantial weight of its calamities. These calamities come to women with breast cancer by way of early death, painful death, disabling treatment, disabling late effects of treatments, loss of partners, income, and capacity, but the calamities also come via the social morass of the disease—its class politics, gendered delimitations, and racialized distribution of death, its rotating scheme of confused instructions and brutal mystifications.

To write only of oneself is not to write only of death, but under these conditions, to write more specifically of a type of death or a deathlike state to which no politics, no collective action, no broader history might be admitted. Breast cancer’s industrial etiology, medicine’s misogynist and racist histories and practices, capitalism’s incredible machine of profit, and the unequal distribution by class of the suffering and death of breast cancer are omitted from breast cancer’s now-common literary form. To write only of oneself may be to write of death, but to write of death is to write of everyone. As Lorde wrote, “I carry tattooed upon my heart a list of names of women who did not survive, and there is always a space for one more, my own.”

Sometimes to give a person a word to call their suffering is the only treatment for it.

I think, too, of how once I always insisted that the best thing about life was that hair grew, which was the simple evidence that nothing stayed the same forever, and therefore proof of the possibilities that the world could change. Now it wasn’t just that my hair would fall out, it was that my follicles would die, and painfully, that what once grew would stop growing even as I myself kept living, and everything I once understood about the world as evident would be subject to another proof.

“Fuck cancer”9 is always the wrong slogan if for no other reason than that the cancer is your own body growing inside you, but also because “cancer” is a historically specific, socially constructed imprecision and not an empirically established monolith. This whole time I’ve been writing about cancer, I’ve been writing about something that scientists agree doesn’t quite exist, at least not as one unified thing. Fuck white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s ruinous carcinogenosphere would be a lot better, but it is

I am certain that my illness would make a better book if it were someone else’s.

Cancer’s attraction is that it is a disease of probability rather than communicability, she tells me, and every person with cancer can be understood as someone who has cancer so you won’t have to.

Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born.