I have been thinking about Elizabeth Edwards’ breasts, about her bold life force, about her truly living each day. As I think about her holding her life above the cancer, I think about other heroic women I’ve known who have also, and do also live strong and womanly… with breast cancer.

This is a photograph of my friend, Deena Metzger: she is a healer who lives in California. This picture was taken of her in 1978. It is the first photograph most of my generation ever saw of a woman in a glory of life who’d had a breast removed because of breast cancer. The name of the photo is “Tree” because she had a flowering branch tattooed across her mastectomy scar. She is now a beautiful sensual old woman, this being nearly 30 years later; her tattoo holds, as does her huge womanly spirit.

Thirty years earlier than Deena, people with breast cancer were treated as trees were treated, but in a bad way. Gouge out whatever part is sick. If the patient lives, good enough.

The first woman patient I’d ever seen who’d had a mastectomy, had had one back in the 1950s when the surgeons, I don’t know what they were thinking…. she looked as though she’d been opened by a chainsaw and sewed back together with railroad track lumber. She was my patient when I was a volunteer shrink at the local hospital in the early 70s and that scar on her body, definitely a crater rather than a drawn line, was then over twenty years old. She was in the hospital for a completely unrelated condition

…but seeing this grave wound to her body, I saw that, whomsoever had removed her breast, had sawed away her ribs there and took those out and did not put them back; they had excised all the muscle and thrown it away. All that was left where her breast had been was a huge sunken teardrop about 7 x 5 inches across. I could see her entire heart beating a mere nick away under her thin skin. Her heart had no other covering. Up, then up more went her skin as her heart beat, literally her skin throbbed with the diastole and the systole, up up and then down. Up, then up some more, then down. It was, like many a scar is that has a wild story contained in the scar itself, wondrous, horrifying and awe striking all at once.

Her husband, she said, would never touch her there in that so wounded place. I was young and beside myself about what she’d said. What did she mean, he wouldn’t touch her? Her husband, I’d met him. He was kind and deeply concerned about his wife’s welfare and sat beside her nearly the whole night every night just like a huge sorrowing watch-over-you dog. One evening when he arrived for his love vigil, I just blurted it all out, immediately embarrassed at the situation, at my own lack of finesse: “She says you wont touch her ‘there’.”

He mumbled the way men do when they are afraid of being judged. There was no judgment here. I got tears. He got tears. She got tears. I don’t know if it was sexual or spiritual or both or neither. I don’t know if a third person is supposed to be involved in such intimacy between two people like them.

But, I took my hand and gently pulled away her gown and said he could put his hand on mine as I touched her. Just like that; I did touch this great concave valley of her body, where I could still feel the breast, the spirit of her breast: warm, replying, deep. I did feel a dizziness to know this, palpably feel the womanliness of her. And her husband, he laid his big hand over mine. I remember feeling baptized in flesh, from the Greek baptizein, meaning, to be buried into… my hand feeling the warmth of her body under my palm and the warmth of his hand over mine.

I did slide my hand out from under his, and he was touching her then, all by himself. You know there are moments between two people that give off such shine you cannot stand to look. This time was one of those. I slipped away. I hoped it wasn’t because I was a coward. I hope it was out of respect. I only knew that he was now somehow, and in some way experiencing what I’d just understood… that literally holding a woman’s heart in your hand, a woman’s beating heart right in your hand, breast or no breast, puts you closer to a woman and what is womanly about her, than you have ever been, can ever hope to be, in all the days of your whole entire life.

Radiant lovers. That was one of my thoughts.

As I was thinking about Elizabeth Edwards’ breasts as I write, I’m recalling another female, a famous one, who still has both breasts; Ann. I thought about the highly unusual and brave call to Chris Matthews’ show by Mrs. Edwards regarding Ann’s remarks about John Edwards. I thought the call was off the wall brave. But more, it was one of the clearest displays that having breasts has nothing to do with being yielding, loving, feminine in the deepest ways. That the breast does not define the depth of womanliness.

Live long and thrive Elizabeth Edwards and all our sisters and brothers who are crossing the water, holding their lives above the currents… Some will say Elizabeth Edwards was making political statements when she called to confront Ann, and that EE was out of her tree… I’d say, Yes. Tree is right. But, ‘out of’ is wrong. Elizabeth Edwards is in just the right tree. In just her right mind.

Tree
I am no longer afraid of mirrors
where I see the sign of the amazon,
the one who shoots arrows.
There was a fine red line across my chest
where a knife entered,
but now a branch winds about the scar
and travels from arm to heart.
Green leaves cover the branch,
grapes hang there and a bird appears.
What grows in me now is vital
and does not cause me harm.
I think the bird is singing.
I have relinquished some of the scars.
I have designed my chest with the care
given to an illuminated manuscript.
I am no longer ashamed to make love.
Love is a battle I can win.
I have the body of a warrior
who does not kill or wound.
On the book of my body,
I have permanently inscribed a tree.

©Deena Metzger, All Rights Reserved

CODA
Credit: Photograph © Hella Hamid;
This photo with words is also a poster.