Thinking about Pink

In the midst of the giddy "I like it on..." facebook status updates and various other attempts to make breast cancer awareness a number one priority in the month of October, I am beginning to ponder just what "awareness" (of any disease, really) means for a culture that, for the most part, would rather focus primarily on cures and survival. (Cures and survival are *really* good things, so please know that I am not promoting a pessimistic view of the entire agenda--after all, part of its purpose is to raise money to help fund needed research.) The area in-between, however, by which I mean the treatments that can often be brutal, the uncertainty of making it through them, and, yes, even death, seems largely ignored by the mainstream media. What I am getting at is this: how "aware" is anyone really willing to be when it comes to the gray area of Stage IV disease?

Many women with metastatic disease live perpetually in the shadows of the "think pink" movement--why exactly this is, I am not completely sure, but I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that they are, as they (and we) well know, probably going to die from the illness. Whether it may be two years or fifteen years down the road, who knows? But let's be honest--that's scary as hell. To them. To their partners and children. To us. And, given the sometimes fiercely overbearing rhetoric of those campaigns only concerned with promoting survival/cure as the only possible laudable goal of the cancer patient, they are considered to have "lost" their "battle" with the disease and are painted as "succumbing" to it (if, indeed, they are painted at all). I argue that these women should be acknowledged as having just as much relevance to the fight against cancer as those who have emerged from their own treatments without metastases. They have, quite often, participated in experimental drug studies to help researchers create better treatments. They have, through pain and uncertainty, raised children, held jobs, and kicked ass.

Rather than serving as frightening reminders of our own mortality, these women are, instead, a testament to strength, grace, and unbelievable perseverance. After my mother passed away from breast cancer in 2005 (after having lived with mets for ten years), I stumbled upon an online community called "bcmets"--a discussion board whose members are almost all women with metastatic breast cancer. They give each other candid advice, console each other's families when a member passes, and maintain a positive, caring approach to living in that precarious space between life and death. There is nothing maudlin about these women; instead, they seem to display a wisdom that comes, I suppose, from pondering all sorts of very heavy questions on a regular basis.

So, if I am going to do my part for raising awareness of breast cancer, my contribution is going to be to publicly declare admiration for those women out there with Stage IV breast cancer. They have not lost the battle.