The Accidental Amazon

Because Rachel literally had friends all over the globe, a live stream feed was set up so that those who could not be at her memorial service on Saturday, February 11, 2012, could watch it while it was happening. Enormous thanks go to Ronnie at Being Sarah for obtaining and posting these links for the recordings of that live feed, in case you didn’t get to watch it in real time. And I echo his thanks to Courtney G. Woodhouse, who set up the feed and provided these links so quickly.

Unfortunately, as Ronnie mentions, the links don’t include the first three speakers, who were Rachel’s sister-in-law Jessalynn, Rach’s mother-in-law (the incomparable MIL mentioned in several of her posts) and Rach’s dear, wonderful mom, who spoke for herself as well as for Rach’s brother, who could not be there. Sarah, of Being Sarah, recorded these three women on film herself and will be able to provide links to their contributions at a later date.
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It was indescribable to be there. So, I will let these links, and those who are on them, speak for themselves.

The first comprises Rachel’s and Anthony’s family and local friends:

Rachel’s Memorial Service, Part 1

The second includes some of Rach’s sister bloggers, friends from Australia, her childhood, college and work. And, at the end, her beloved Anthony.

Rachel’s Memorial Service, Part 2
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There will also be a Twitter chat at #bcsm tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST on helping us heal from our losses.
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So, don’t mind if I fall apart,
There’s more room in a broken heart.
– from Coming Around Again, by Carly Simon

Rachel Cheetham Moro 1970-2012

Yesterday, I was truly grateful and privileged to participate in Rachel’s memorial service, and to be surrounded by her friends and family. I was grateful that three other sisters in our blogosphere were able to be there with me — Sarah Horton, of Being Sarah; Gayle Sulik, author of Pink Ribbon Blues; and Stacey, of Bringing Up Goliath. I was grateful for the tears, love, stories, laughter and sheer gratitude expressed by so many for having her in our lives. I was grateful to be able to speak about her, too, in my turn. Her husband, her beloved Anthony, kindly shared this link to some photos of Rachel throughout her too-short but amazing life: Rachel’s life in pictures.

Today, for now, my own words have run dry, but they will come again. All week, I’ve had poetry in my head, as so many of us have had and shared. And in particular, two of my favorite poems by Marge Piercy seem so aptly to describe the Rachel we all knew and valued and loved. I’d like to share them.
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The first, To be of use:

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

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The second, an excerpt from For Strong Women:

[...]A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other.
________________________

Susan, front-left, wearing glasses; Rachel, back row, third from right; NBCC 2011

It was through their words, written on their blogs, that many of us first came to know Rachel Cheetham Moro and Susan Neibur. A lucky few of us got to meet them, along with the other bloggers in the august, feisty group pictured above, at the National Breast Cancer Coalition Conference in April, 2011. It was a rare treat to put a face, a smile, a whole person — “Oh, my god!” we said, laughing, “you’re real!!” — with the women we had come to know in cyberspace. It seems impossible that we lost them both this week, on Monday, February 6, 2012, a day now etched into our hearts.

I, who write almost every day in some fashion, usually with a fair amount of ease, have struggled all week with a heavy silence in my soul, a speechless inner keening, any words I might choose drowned in tears and heartache and shock. Yet we all knew, we all feared, that such a day would come. They were both young, both in their thirties when they were diagnosed with breast cancer. And within a handful of years, their cancer turned metastatic. Yet they continued to write, to speak their truth, to awaken us to a reality that too often seems lost amidst a sea of pink.

If there is any comfort to be had in this catastrophe, this tragic loss, it is that their words have made a difference, and will continue to do so. Of the many posts, tributes, and articles so far written about them, I wanted to share these two, each written for online news sites, each testifying to the power and reach of the words our two sisters have left behind.

The first is a call to action, to demand better from an organization that purports to be keeping its promise to another young woman, diagnosed in her thirties, robbed of life by metastatic breast cancer. Fittingly, the article, published two days after her death, quotes Rachel: The real scandal: science denialism at Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

The second, published on a Washington Post blog, honors Susan: Susan Niebur, the Toddler Planet hero, friend and mother.

All week, I’ve been turning to the words of other wise women who have written, who knew the power of words. And I found this, an excerpt from a poem by Adrienne Rich, from her collection The Dream of a Common Language, that articulates the power of telling our stories:

–from Transcendental Etude

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap in transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
–And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.
At most we’re allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a women’s voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman’s heartbeat
heard ever after from a distance,
the loss of that ground-note echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.

Everything else seems beyond us,
we aren’t ready for it, nothing that was said
is true for us, caught naked in the argument,
the counterpoint, trying to sightread
what our fingers can’t keep up with, learn by heart
what we can’t even read. And yet
it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi
or child prodigies, there are no prodigies
in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn
cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are
– even when all the texts describe it differently.

And we’re not performers, like Liszt, competing
against the world for speed and brilliance
[...]
The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside
the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.
The woman who sits watching, listening,
eyes moving in the darkness
is rehearsing in her body, hearing-out in her blood
a score touched off in her perhaps
by some words, a few chords, from the stage:
a tale only she can tell.
[...]

Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow-colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away,
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow–
original domestic silk, the finest findings–
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and the dry darkbrown lace of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
the striving for greatness, brilliance –
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright, silk against roughness,
pulling the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that, wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound;
and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows.
——————————————

For Rachel, for Susan, we must all keep writing their stories and ours.

February 6, 2012: This morning, I found out that my dear, darling friend, snark and ‘bitchblogger’ sister, Rachel Cheetham Moro, died of breast cancer. Many of us first got to know her through her blog Cancer Culture Chronicles. Then, in April of 2011, I had the great joy of meeting her, along with several other of our blog sisters, in person, at the NBCC Conference in Washington, D.C. We got a chance to be ‘real,’ to laugh, to scheme, to tell our collective truth about this miserable disease together. We were friends now in real life as well as in virtual life. It was a friendship that deepened immeasurably over the last year.

You may visit her blog to leave messages at this link: Rachel Cheetham Moro 1970-2012. We will never forget you, Rach. Never.

I wasn’t going to write a post today. Yeah, it’s World Cancer Day. Yeah, we all heard yesterday that Komen retracted its decision to defund Planned Parenthood. And yeah, the long-awaited documentary film, Pink Ribbons, Inc., about the rampant pink-washing of breast cancer, is going to be distributed in the U.S. It’s a remarkable confluence of events. So it’s certainly not like there’s nothing to blog about.

But I’m tired of cancer. And today, I’m particularly distraught about cancer, because a young woman who is very dear to me is in the hospital. Again. Because of breast cancer. And her friends and family are all waiting to hear whether her mets have spread.

And I think about this remarkable confluence of events, and Komen, and pink-washing, and why we even have to have a World Cancer Day, and it sickens me.

Because my friend was diagnosed in her thirties. Because another friend, who was also diagnosed with breast cancer in her thirties, was turned down by Komen for a small grant to help women get screening mammograms before they’re forty. Because Komen told her that “Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s current screening guidelines are not in line with what your organization promotes,” because their guidelines recommend screening mammograms starting at age forty. Because Susan G. Komen herself was diagnosed with and died of breast cancer in her thirties. Because when another young woman I know tried to get financial assistance from Komen to help her with her breast cancer, Komen failed to help. Because Komen still pushes mammograms as the be-all-and-end-all of ‘prevention,’ when most of us know they have serious limitations, that they don’t even find breast cancer sometimes, especially in young women and women with dense breast tissue. You know. Women like Susan G. Komen.

Because Nancy Brinker happens to be one of the most publicly ill-informed breast cancer spokespersons on the planet. Because Komen has not made metastatic breast cancer, the kind that killed Susan G. Komen, a priority. Because, in fact, Komen spends only 19% of their considerable budget to find that much-vaunted cure they’re supposed to be all about. Because only 2% of all cancer research dollars are spent directly on metastatic cancer. Because only one day in Pinktober is set aside for awareness of metastatic breast cancer.

Because I’m utterly disgusted at this hypocrisy. And I’ve got news for all the folks who finally saw the light about Komen and decided in the last few days to stop supporting them: Komen didn’t deserve your support in the first place, and they haven’t deserved it for a long time now.

So, maybe we should actually be grateful that Komen let its pink, plastic, carcinogenic, over-merchandised mask slip this week and showed their true face. Because it woke a lot of people up, to the insidious speciousness of politics, to the callousness of charities that seem to care more about corporate sponsorship than they do about corporate integrity, to the large holes in our so-called social safety net. And I am truly glad for that awakening. But guess what? As Jody Schoger said in her post yesterday, “…what has changed for women at risk for cancer? Nothing. Poverty is still a carcinogen. Women who are poor are still poor. Their cancers are still detected at later stages when the disease is much more difficult to treat.”

This mess, this perversion of breast cancer awareness, didn’t just happen this week. It’s been going on for decades. And I’m sick of it. Because it needs to change, before more of us die, before we all drown in pink ribbons instead of saving ourselves with genuine enlightenment and solutions. Because it’s just the tip of the pink iceberg.

A link from the Centers for Disease Control about their Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening Program for underserved women. Not the whole answer, but one of them.