Running for the cure to fear

I don‘t hear the gun go off. I just start running when everyone else does. Disorder ensues. There are more than 27,000 people running and walking down Central Park West today. Thanks to a paltry P.A. system, walkers have crowded the starting line instead of allowing runners to go ahead. There are only pockets of urgency in this crowd, little streams of motion where runners can break out. I search for a current to fall into, but mostly my stride is abbreviated, like a wild mare in a thunder-spooked herd of mustangs.

Eventually, the same miracle that causes people to drive with civility when traffic lights fail descends upon this aggregation of women. We begin to move through Central Park like a giant, snaking flood of female flesh, dotted with pink paper “in memory of” signs that say things like “My Mommy,” “Mi Abuelita,” “My kid sister Mary Jane,” “My best friend Renee.” These are worn by women who lost women to breast cancer. Mine says “adopted daughters.” I have the supreme luck of never having lost someone close to me from breast cancer, a virulent mutation that takes one of every eight women. I also have the queer experience of saying “I don't know” to every gynecologist who asks about my medical history. I'm sure I'm not alone.

Whatever the individual experiences of these 27,000 women, we all share something not necessary to speak. We hate breast cancer. We hate that it attacks a part of our bodies many of us have come to equate with the very nature of being female. We hate that of all the advanced science at the disposal of the medical world, our choices, when faced with this foe, are poisoning, burning and dismemberment.

It's not death that scares me. I've courted death so much, I feel like it owes me alimony. People like me have much smaller fears. I am afraid of the disfigurement. I am afraid of finding myself even further out on the fringes of mainstream culture than I already am. I am afraid of doing that battle by myself. I am afraid of being unlovable if and when I should ever have to do it.

The truth is, I rarely ever think about breast cancer. It's too grown up for me. I am still reveling in my newfound perception that I am beautiful. For much of my life, I felt so hideous I could hardly bear to be in my body. Once in a while, I would catch a glimpse of a beautiful woman within myself, but only in scattered moments. Mostly, I saw a collection of unmatched and imperfect body parts, that if somehow tamed or tightened or changed, would open the door to love. I didn't know that I was creating myself the whole time. Now that I do, I occasionally overcorrect with the juvenile language of a soul making a turnaround. That is, when someone tells me I look good, I say I know, not with conceit, but in a sort of amazed agreement.

So it is I am something of an impostor among the 27,000. I just signed up for a race with very little thought to what it was for. I have no business aligning myself with these brave and broken hearts. I haven't the courage to hold one of their handbags, much less walk in their shoes. Yet it feels so good to be among them, and to be reminded that femaleness is not at all a collection of body parts, but an intrepid, unstoppable force that lives long after the body has gone away.

Monday, September 20, 1999

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.