An excerpt from Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer by Ariel Gore
Does My Breast Look Weird?
Deena stepped out of the shower and opened her towel in the steam. “Does my breast look weird?”
We are taught to delineate between health and sickness in these moments.
As such, this is where our story begins.
When I used to ask my old friend Mary TallMountain how she was doing, she’d say, “Ah, you know, honey. I’m always dying and always keeping on.”
Deena’s breast did not look weird to me.
Maybe we’re always dying and always keeping on.
Fear
“Are you sleeping?”
“No,” Deena said.
Our bedroom was dark except for a sparkling shaft of moonlight through the window.
“I’m kind of high, but I’m scared.”
“Scared of what, love?”
It had been a few days since Deena asked me if her breast looked weird, but it was more than that. “Something bad happens every seven years.” I took a deep breath and held it. I was about to turn forty-nine. Seven times seven. I already knew it would be bad.
Deena whispered, “No, love. Nothing bad’s gonna happen.”
She’s Jewish and agnostic and good at reassuring me.
But I’m a magical thinker and good at watching out for signs.
I exhaled. Everything was okay. Maybe everything would stay okay. Maybe I was just a little bit high and had the shitty kind of obsessive-compulsive tendencies that do this superstitious math but never keep the house clean.
I’m a magical thinker and good at watching out for signs.
Deena had my back. Deena curled into it.
But then I looked up at our dark bedroom window, at the moonlit reflection of our life, and I looked over Deena’s shoulder, tattooed with a half sleeve of violets, and I settled my gaze into the layers of the reflection, and that’s when I saw Deena’s dead mother doing dishes in our kitchen.
I’d never seen Deena’s dead mother doing dishes in our kitchen before. Not ever. I took a quick breath.
This
was
going
to
be
bad.
Legacy
When Deena’s mother, Jessie, learned she had breast cancer in the 1970s, she and Deena’s dad decided to filter information from their children. When they did share news with the kids, Deena’s father indicated it was secret “family business.”
In a world before Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and before the pink campaigns of the 1990s and beyond, this was culturally normative.
Your silence will not protect you.
—Audre Lorde1
That’s a famous quote used in a lot of contexts, but Audre wrote it about breast cancer. It was in this same era that Susan Sontag’s breast cancer spread to her lymph nodes, and she had a complicated unilateral mastectomy—facts she chose not to mention in her 1977 classic, Illness as Metaphor.2
Silence didn’t seem to hurt Susan Sontag.
But silence didn’t protect Deena’s mother. Her cancer eventually metastasized to her brain, and she died in 2009. In her obituary, it said she’d had “a 15-year fight with cancer,” but Deena remembers it as more than twice that long.
The Chorus
I started interviewing friends and strangers who’d experienced cancer, asking them for their stories. Did their breasts look weird? Did everything turn out okay? In the dark reflection of our bedroom window in Santa Fe, I could see the chorus assemble.
Lee: As I dried from the shower, I noticed my left nipple seemed to pull into the breast itself. I did a self-exam, but I didn’t feel a lump, just the foreshortened nipple. I thought, Does my nipple look weird? I thought, What the hell—maybe it’s just one more weirdness of aging.
Nancy: I’d just gotten out of the shower. I have curly hair, so I hang my head upside down, bending over at the hips, to spray the gel in. That’s when I noticed the dent in my boob. I’d been noticing it for a while, honestly. Weird-looking, but I’d never felt any lumps. I thought maybe it was just some scar tissue left from an infection I’d had years before from mastitis when I breastfed my kids. Or maybe I’d gained some weight? Maybe it wasn’t that weird. But that day, when I stood up, the dent I’d only noticed before when I was bent over stayed dented. I thought, What the hell? There still wasn’t any palpable lump, but I called a friend who worked at the mammogram clinic for uninsured folks on the Pacific Northwest island where I live. Online, I found the Know Your Lemons campaign. I did think my lemon looked weird.
Paula: My mammogram revealed a spot, and they did a needle biopsy.
Cleotha: I was teaching my regular Thursday morning yoga class in the Old Fourth Ward in Atlanta. I wore this thin white sports bra. I always got down on the floor with my students. I shifted into downward dog. I was thinking everyday random thoughts you’re not really supposed to think about when you’re doing yoga, like Was it dumb to put money into my savings account when I still had credit card debt? That’s when I noticed a red-brown discharge on the outside of my white bra. My bra looked super weird for sure. I thought, Huh.
Stormy: I always did regular breast self-exams. I knew my breasts pretty well, so the lump freaked me out. I called a friend who’d had her own breast cancer scare a year before. She said, “Does it feel like a rock or a water balloon?” I said, “I guess it feels like a little water balloon.” She said that was good. Cancer feels more like a rock, but I should definitely get it checked out. I thought so, too.
We all step out of the shower each morning.
We all take stock, to some degree.
We wonder, Am I still living in a standard-enough body?
We ask, Has my nonstandard body deviated even more?
We turn it over, Maybe deviation is the standard.
We think, What the hell?
Maybe we consider our insurance status.
We say, Huh.
We decide, Maybe I should get that checked out.
The River Trail
I want to quicken up the pace of the beginning of this narrative, but the beginning meandered like a river.
Deena thought her breast looked weird.
Deena had lived through her mother’s breast cancer.
Deena called her doctor to schedule a mammogram.
Deena thought her breast looked weird.
Some days, we pretended not to think about it. We fell easily into bed, and I pressed my fingers into the soft edges of her breasts. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong—no lumps—just this slightly spongy redness at the bottom—maybe it’s just a perimenopause thing—maybe it’s that cute, new, red polka-dot bra just rubbing the wrong way?” And Deena said, “You’re just looking for an excuse to feel me up.” And maybe that was true, and we laughed at all the ways our bodies would always look weirder and weirder, the delights of middle age, and Deena used her strength to roll both of us over, so she was above me now.
In the morning, Deena would get that mammogram.
In the morning, I’d take our son, Max, to middle school, and I’d come home to work on an editing deadline or ghost-writing project.
In the morning, I said, “First, let’s go for a walk.”
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.
—Mary Oliver, “At the River Clarion”3
Outside our mid-century house in Santa Fe, a flagstone path leads from our front door to the sidewalk.
Turn right. Amble past our free little library.
(It’s a busy walking street, so every day, new book titles glow in the window. You can stop if you like.)
Keep walking past the cedar coyote fences and the bent chain links, past the cinder block and stucco walls.
At the corner, look both ways before you cross—even when the light holds green. It’s a notorious intersection.
Once you’re safely across, you can cut through the parking lot, blow kisses to the crows on the fenceposts, loop around the pull-up bars and the edge of the little playground, and follow the path downhill between the running track and the round labyrinth dug into the dirt.
The color scheme here is the color scheme everywhere in this high desert town: juniper greens and chamisa yellows, clay reds and tumbleweed browns.
Cross the bridge made of rusting metal and wood planks that look like rail ties.
Most seasons, the Santa Fe riverbed below runs dry, but it’s early summer now, so a streamlet flows along this endangered tributary of the Rio Grande.
From here, you can turn right or left. A paved trail wends above the waterway in both directions. I like to turn right.
Deena reached for my hand and held on.
At our feet, a gray bunny darted out from behind a stand of aspen trees and hesitated. Above, a Cooper’s hawk circled. The blue sky stretched cloudless ahead of us to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance.
I squeezed Deena’s hand. I saw she had tears in her eyes as she watched the bird. I said, “What do you think’s gonna happen?”
She said, “I think I probably have breast cancer, so it’s a good thing we’re catching it early.”
Things I Do When I Feel Like There’s Too Much I Can’t Control
- Make and cancel hotel reservations in places I do or don’t have tickets for—New York, Paris, the northern coast of Sardinia.
- Scroll through social media and fall for the ads for $84 houndstooth travel skirts at once kind of sporty and grandma.
- Remodel the kitchen in apartments I don’t live in.
- Disorder my eating, making grand plans for starvation as I stand under the scalding hot shower in the morning and ending up on the couch in the evening binging on burnt caramel chocolate squares and handfuls of salty tortilla chips.
- Drink wine by the can because cans seem less totally alcoholic than bottles.
- Check the credit card balances in an all-muscle panic, the hotel reservations and the houndstooth travel skirts and the cans of wine and the out-of-network medical appointments adding up and up and up.
- Deena says it’s okay. She has life insurance. I can pay the bills when she dies, no problem. I nod in her direction and make another hotel reservation.
New York
An online flight tracker alerted me to the $99 tickets into JFK, and I yelled to twelve-year-old Max and texted my almost-thirty-year-old daughter, Maia: Pack your weekenders, kids.
I could finish my ghostwriting project from a New York hotel and still meet the deadline.
I like New York because New York doesn’t mind if you’re wrecked, tired, broke, and waiting to bleed, gray roots showing while you’re shoving greasy dim sum into your mouth just as you realize you recognize Martha Stewart at the next table, and you want to celebrity-post on social media so bad, but you actually kind of like Martha Stewart ever since that time she went to jail in the ’90s, and you made posters that read, Martha Stewart, Sister, You Are Welcome In This Home, and you want her to be able to eat dim sum in peace, so you try and take a stealth selfie so as not to bother her.
It was that kind of a day.
We had grand plans for Coney Island.
Deena wanted to come to New York, too, of course, but Deena had to work. Deena always had to work at the restaurant of the country club in our town. She’s a chef. She often worked late into the nights. Someday Deena wouldn’t have to work so much anymore.
“Then we’re gonna retire to New York!” I always said, and I showed Deena pictures of studios in Brooklyn and Harlem and one-bedrooms in the Bronx next to the place where seniors can get lunch for a dollar.
Deena acted like I was thinking eccentrically far into the future. I wasn’t even forty-nine, and she was only five years older than me. I just wanted for us to be seniors in the Bronx who could get lunch for a dollar!
But now I was in Manhattan with Max and Maia. And Deena wasn’t with us because she had to work. Deena texted though: Have fun on Coney Island! Don’t forget to get the pelmeni in Brighton Beach even if you already gorged on dumplings and egg rolls in Manhattan.
The other reason Deena couldn’t come to New York was because she had a diagnostic mammogram scheduled.
The first mammogram images had looked “fine,” the doctors said, but because she’d told them she thought her breast looked weird, and maybe because her mom had died of breast cancer, she qualified for the additional imaging. “Diagnostic” meant she’d get an ultrasound, too.
The kids and I ate dumplings at Nom Wah Tea Parlor.
We took stealth pictures of Martha Stewart.
My friend Katherine Arnoldi texted, Meet me at the Whitney?
I didn’t have to tell my kids that Katherine Arnoldi is the famous author of The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom.
I like New York because everyone’s famous in New York.
Deena texted, I’m kind of worried about the diagnostic mammogram, but I keep telling myself it’s going to be okay. It’s got to count for something that the regular mammogram looked fine.
As we headed to the Whitney, I texted back, It does have to count!
But that night in a hotel in Manhattan, I dreamed Deena’s arms were made of tightly clustered leaves—thick Brussels sprout branches—and I dug my fingers into an opening between the leaves in those branches, and that’s when I saw the little Brussels sprout with black spots, and I started looking for more, and there they were, three or four, now five and six, on each of Deena’s arms, these little Brussels sprouts with black spots on them, and I started digging through leaves and trying to take them out, one by one, like a vegetable game of Operation. Why did all the Brussels sprouts have these black spots on them?
Sometimes I can see a story before it happens. But it’s never the story I want to see.
Sometimes I can see a story before it happens. But it’s never the story I want to see.
Back in Santa Fe, Deena’s radiologist wore glasses like mine. She had dark curly hair like me. She nodded at a screen. “There’s a breast mass,” she said. “It doesn’t look like a malignancy, but we’ve got some lymph nodes over here that I’m going to call suspicious.” She made quick eye contact. This radiologist still looked nice and nurturing, like me, but the mood shifted. “Let’s schedule a biopsy.”
When my old friend Sia got her first breast biopsy, we both still lived in Portland. The results came back benign, and she called me, left a voicemail. I met her at Mary’s, a strip club downtown. Our friend Viva Las Vegas was dancing that night.
As we stepped in from the rain, Viva muttered to the bartender, “Oh, great, my writing teacher’s here.”
A neon sign buzzed in the window.
In my defense, I was everyone’s writing teacher in those days.
Sia and I knocked back whiskey shots in celebration of her good health. She smiled wide and said, “Cancer-free! Young motherhood gonna save me yet.”
Back then, we thought that since we’d had our first kids young, we’d protected ourselves from breast cancer. The statistics said a full-term pregnancy before age twenty cut our chances of getting the disease in half. We laughed at our good fortune.
Viva worked the pole to Loretta Lynn and Jack White. Petite and blonde and not that much younger than Sia and me, Viva left the stage with a flourish: “Thank you for supporting the arts!”
Wouldn’t we all live forever?
Eighty percent of people who have a breast biopsy learn they do not have cancer.
The odds were still on Deena’s side.
The odds were still on Sia’s side in those days, too.
The odds were still on Viva’s side.
Max woke up in our hotel room in Manhattan talking fast. He reached out and shook my shoulder. “Mama, we were flying!”
“What, baby?”
“I dreamed me and you and Deena were jet skiing!” Max sat up in his soft single bed. “We were going higher and higher into the sky, and the rope broke, and then we were flying. But then we came crashing down into the snow. It must have been wintertime, which would explain all the little elves—and Santa! And there was a dog with antlers.”
“A dog with antlers? Was the dream fun? Or scary?”
“Both,” Maxito laughed. “But crashing was fun.”
I could see the broken rope and the three of us floating down, more like we were parachuting than crashing. More like we were riding the dog with antlers, some strange new ride at Coney Island. The slow motion of it made it feel more like magic than terror.
I picked up my phone and texted Sia: I think Deena has breast cancer.
Copyright © 2025 by Ariel Gore. Reprinted with permission from The Feminist Press.