The Bitch Is Back: Older, Wiser, and (Getting) Happier by Cathi Hanauer

Author:Cathi Hanauer [Hanauer, Cathi]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Around the time my hair fell out, courtesy of chemotherapy, a male friend called. He wanted to know if I still felt “womanly.” Of course, I answered. Never more so. And yet there was a strange contradiction at work. Breast cancer is a disease that goes to the very heart of being a woman at the same time it shreds your sense of what, on the surface at least, that means.

Simone de Beauvoir once remarked that in life, the members of her gender had two jobs—that of being a woman, with all its trappings and demands, its masquerades and its compromises . . . and that of being a person. I suppose breast cancer revealed to me the difference between the two. (Ironically, de Beauvoir herself never figured it out; in her later work, she argued that old age destroys a woman’s reason for being.)

Breast cancer treatments, at least for veterans of the slash, poison, and burn school, are a crash course in what it’s like to grow old, like those sped-up nature films that show a plant growing from blossom to compost in about five seconds. You lose your looks, you lose your energy, your memory is full of holes, and you are vulnerable to every virus that flies by. But at the same time, you also find yourself looking at the world in a broader, more expansive way.

I don’t mean to make light of how awful treatment can be. There were days when I lay in bed staring out the window at a single birch tree, as if fixing on its sunlit beauty was like clinging to the only spar in a vast and very dark sea. But the birch tree reminded me of how large the world was and how unimportant was my place in it. It became a reminder: to let things be what they were, to live unsentimentally. To pare away the unnecessary neuroses, the compulsion to be at the center of every thought; to look at the world without the intervening lens of self.

One evening, when I was about midway through chemotherapy, I was sitting alone in my living room, staring at the night-darkened windows as the lamplight cast strange reflections in the glass. Suddenly I jumped; it seemed there was something or someone else in the room. Staring at me from the windowpane was a large pale oval, like a giant egg, but no—the shape was wearing thick brown spectacles. It was an old, bald, fat-faced man. I almost turned around to check, but then I finally understood: The old fat guy was me, hairless from chemo, puffy from steroids.

I was horror-stricken—and then I had to laugh. I thought of the endless hours I had spent in my life before cancer interrogating the mirror, noting the appearance of every new line, worrying about what sort of makeup and clothes an older woman should wear if she didn’t want to look like “mutton dressed as lamb,” as the Brits so splendidly put it.

Now, my

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