The Cancer Journals

Lorde twice compares her feelings post-mastectomy to that of being separated from a mother. First, she works to convince herself that she can endure the pain of separation from such a key part of her being (Lorde’s mother, however, was still living). The second instance occurs when a friend tells her that “for six months after her mother died, she felt she couldn’t think or remember”—a feeling of shock with which Lorde wholly relates (34). Lorde’s connection of a breast to maternal love is intuitive, considering that the breast is often a mother’s means of nourishing her infant. Thus, Lorde’s comparison reiterates her initial feeling of having been deprived of a key aspect of her womanhood. Lorde works to revise this position, both in the interest of minimizing her emotional pain and in reassessing society’s fixation on essentialist concepts of womanhood. Still, Lorde’s comparison helps readers, most of whom have probably not undergone a mastectomy, and many of whom probably never will, connect the sense of loss to something more tangible: the painful yet necessary experiences of separating from a parent when transitioning to adulthood and, later, mourning a parent. Similarly, Lorde mourned the loss of her breast, then accepted her transition to life as a single-breasted woman.

On Lorde’s third day in the hospital after her mastectomy a woman from Reach for Recovery arrives and gives Lorde a package. Inside, is “a wad of lambswool pressed into a pale pink breast-shaped pad” (34). The lambswool is a rudimentary prosthesis that Lorde rejects, just as she rejects the woman’s accompanying message that the lambswool will make her look and, supposedly, feel just as she had before the surgery. The wad of lambswool becomes symbolic of the false reassurance that society offers women who have survived breast cancer—an act that angers Lorde for conditioning a focus on attractiveness. The lambswool initiates Lorde’s decision to avoid prosthesis altogether and to accept that she is a woman with only one breast. While she insists, later in the text, that she is not wholly against the use of prosthesis for all women, despite rejecting it for herself, she believes that women should only adopt prosthesis after thinking about the impact of cancer on their lives and what they wish to do with their new knowledge. Lorde argues that the rush to attend to cosmetic appearance can distract women from understanding how they have been impacted by the illness and the concomitant changes that it imposes.

After receiving her second biopsy in a hospital, Lorde writes about feeling extraordinarily cold in her recovery room. Coldness is a recurring motif in Chapter Two, indicating Lorde’s feeling of isolation post-biopsy, as she strongly senses that the second biopsy will result in the bad news of a malignant lump. The coldness that Lorde feels contrasts with the warmth that her partner, Frances, brings into her room. Lorde describes Frances’s hands as “deliciously warm” and compares her appearance at the door of Lorde’s recovery room to that of “a great sunflower” (25). Frances’s presence reduces Lorde’s feeling of isolation, which was reinforced by the hospital staff’s indifference to Lorde’s literal feeling of coldness. Lorde’s sensory memory also mirrors the coldness of death, which she feels looming upon her when she learns that she has cancer.

Lorde’s feeling of coldness also dissipates when she remembers her time with her former lover, Eudora Garrett. She and Garrett had spent time together in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Lorde dreams of Eudora “in that tiny cold hospital room so different from [Eudora’s] bright hot disheveled bedroom in Cuernavaca” (30). As with Frances, the memory of Garrett is one that Lorde associates with brightness and warmth—really, the feeling of being loved and recognized, which contrasts with the indifference that she feels from the hospital staff and the hospital room’s sterile setting. The recurring feeling of coldness is disrupted only when Lorde finds comfort in her women friends and purpose in writing about her experience with cancer.