Midlife is relentless at tuning your body to a register of pain and mortality. When I think about the treatment my friend will go through, I am scared and filled with hope
Angela GarbesFri 11 Oct 2024 08.00 EDTShareEvery few months, one of my former college roommates sends a mirror selfie to the group chat, taken at a hospital or doctor’s office. Now that we’re all 45 or so, we mark annual mammograms with these dispatches, which we call Mammo Moments.
We compare the cover-ups our healthcare providers offer for the procedures. Mine is the most stylish, a medical blue cropped batwing poncho with silver snap buttons. My friend’s clinic supplies what we call, in vintage Project Runway parlance, “a tortured garment”: a stiff rectangle of synthetic fabric with exaggerated shoulders and stickers to fasten it in place. We send celebrity mammogram Instagram posts (we liked Padma Lakshmi’s facial expressions and reminder to get your “ta-tas” checked and Chrissy Teigen’s boast of “free titty lotion”) and plot a bestselling coffee table book of mammogram selfies.
Striking ridiculous power poses in chilly, sterile changing rooms allows us to feel less alone. Reminding each other to do breast self-exams helps us bond over yet another disgrace of middle age.
Underneath all our texting lurks the real, but vague threat of breast cancer – until, suddenly, it is not vague at all.
At summer’s end, one of my close friends was diagnosed with breast cancer. Smushing our boobs went from something we shared lightly with each other to something ominous. Instead of a morning or afternoon’s inconvenience, the procedure became a potential doorway to torturous weeks of uncertainty, waiting and appointments.
I witnessed my friend go through biopsy, diagnosis, testing, eight-hour days at the hospital, minor surgery. I listened as she calculated impossible decisions: when and how much to tell her children, the risks and benefits of aggressive chemotherapy with a drug nicknamed “the red devil”.
My friend has a long road ahead of her, though the protocols of her treatment are well-established and her care plan is as clear as you could hope. I turn to data and statistics to fill my knowledge gaps, for cold comfort. According to the American Cancer Society, one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. The mortality rate, because of better detection and treatment, has fallen by 42% between 1989 and 2021. I am momentarily heartened to see that Asian and Pacific Islander women have the lowest death rate, then sickened when I read that Black women, at every age, are more likely to die from breast cancer than any other racial or ethnic group.
Fear is not the first feeling I have when I consider mortality“We fall ill, and our illness falls under the hard hand of science, falls onto slides under confident microscopes … falls into new pages open on the browser and new books on the shelf,” writes Anne Boyer in The Undying, her Pulitzer prize-winning memoir about having breast cancer. “Then there is this body (my body) that has no feel for uncertainty, a life that breaks open under the alien terminology of oncology, then into the rift of that language, falls.”
The real possibility that my friend may not survive is painful to bear. I feel as though I have fallen – or may still be falling – through the floor, into an inescapable level of being human that I momentarily tricked myself into thinking I might avoid.
Fear is not the first feeling I have when I consider mortality. I am lucky – so far, my direct experience with death has been minimal and merciful. My parents, who worked closely alongside death in their careers as a hospice nurse and a pathologist, raised me to see it as a natural inevitability, something to be handled with consideration and grace.
My mother-in-law, whom I never met, died of cancer when she was 51. Her absence casts a long shadow; it often feels like a presence. When my husband turned 50 in July, we discussed his apprehension and ambivalence about the next years of his life. How it might feel like a tremendous relief but also somehow wrong to make it to 52.
I’ve been looking at pictures of me and my friend in our 20s – old Polaroids and sepia-toned photo booth strips. I see the glowing skin and sloppiness of youth, joyful defiance, a little hubris. These photos give me a physical tingle, something adjacent to hope.
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Back then, I don’t know that I would have called it hope – possibility, maybe, or perhaps just confidence in the future. The next day, the next year, the next decade would come. It lay before me. All I had to do was show up.
More from Angela Garbes’ Halfway there:
No sex drive and a ‘tanking libido’: how I redefined intimacy in midlife
First my left knee, then my right: my middle-aged body’s betrayal
Perimenopause has brought chaos to my life – but also peace
It isn’t that I no longer have energy or faith. But midlife is particularly relentless at tuning your body to a register of pain and mortality. Each year brings new tests and procedures – mammograms, colonoscopies – and an exponentially expanding list of aches and pains – frozen shoulder, plantar fasciitis, arthritis. I recently went with my parents to my father’s angiogram, startled to see him so small and vulnerable in his hospital gown. My best friend is currently managing her father’s hospice care, and last month we marked the four-year death anniversary of her mother.
While mortality isn’t easy to confront, I accept that I am awash in it, and that it can be tender, even sweet. Because our time together is finite, I want to spend as much of it as I can caring for my people. What could possibly be more important?
When I think about the many months – if all goes well, years – of treatment my friend will go through, I am scared. But I am determined. I am filled with hope, a richer iteration of hope that has evolved, as I have.