Dearly Departed ...

MsMSV

Cancer Girl's column appears on the last page of every MAMM issue. She's such a hoot. http://www.mamm.com/main.php?optjs=1


By Jami Bernard

After her mastectomy, Jillann held a wake for her breast. Cancer Girl wasn't invited.

Was the invitation lost in the mail? Something more sinister? Or is it because Cancer Girl is not personally acquainted with Jillann, a friend of a friend of a neighbor of a…pardon me, Cancer Girl has lost her train of thought again.

Anyway, it seems that Jillann Dugan, a New York actress with a weird and wonderful sense of humor, held a wake for her breast, which she refers to as The Beauty. "As it turns out, losing The Beauty was a bigger deal than I thought," she wrote to friends after her cancer surgery. One of those friends suggested holding a wake for Beauty, and Jillann thought such a celebration was warranted, "since I'm fairly sure she brought joy to the lives she touched."

The wake was held at a pub in midtown Manhattan, and by all accounts from the A-listers who attended, it was a joyful, tearful celebration overflowing with the milk of human kindness—or some other libation more appropriate to a place called the Irish Rogue.

There was no open casket, you'll be relieved to know. Not even a closed one. Beauty was sent to the Halls of Science, or wherever such beauties go when they depart. (Is there a particular place, like an elephant graveyard, where they all congregate to be together for eternity and play canasta?) However, there was a small "healing ceremony," or what Jillann's mother "keeps calling the séance or voodoo ceremony." Jillann and her boyfriend put pictures of The Beauty in a little box and threw it off the 59th Street Bridge. "We watched for a very long time as she floated out to sea," she says. "I never imagined in a million years that such a kooky event would take place, but I'm so glad it did."

I had a lumpectomy 10 years ago and therefore still retain my Beauty, but she is clearly in altered form. A seam runs along her and she sports some topographical anomalies I am hard-pressed to describe. I mean, what's up with those little red, frecklelike dots along the tenderest part of the skin? Is it a pointillist piece of body art?

But Jillann and I are connected, even though we've never met. Ever since my cancer experience, what happens to any other woman's breast is of utter concern to me. Jillann's party has even given me inspiration. From now on, I am going to call my breast Beauty as well. The name Walter was taken. Women who have undergone cancer surgeries sometimes have a hard time adoring their bodies again—if they ever did in the first place. It's so much easier if we can think of each part of ourselves as a treasure, or royalty or Beauty itself. (However, our cellulite we can still refer to as Beelzebub.)

An artist I met right after my surgery had recently lost her breast to cancer. In place of her Beauty, and instead of reconstruction, she opted to have a rose trellis of her own design tattooed there.

To that, I say…ouch! But then I say—you go, girl! There are many ways to celebrate our Beauties—a rose tattoo, a raucous wake, a gift certificate to Bloomingdale's. The point is to love ourselves, each part of ourselves, even the parts that leave us too soon.

Jami Bernard is an author and film critic. Her next book is The Incredible Shrinking Critic, 75 Pounds & Counting: My Excellent Adventure in Weight Loss

Anonymous

Quote:

---

From now on, I am going to call my breast Beauty as well. The name Walter was taken.

---

ROFL @ Walter...I wish I had thought of Walter instead of Frankenboobie!!! Excellent column!