Audre Lorde: A Black Lesbian Feminist Experience of Breast Cancer

First published over 40 years ago, Audre Lorde’s memoir about her breast cancer diagnosis and mastectomy remains one of the most powerful stories on body image, illness, and women’s pain. The following excerpt, published exclusively in Glamour ahead of the book’s re-release on October 13, is just as powerful and relevant today.

The Cancer Journals

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October 10, 1978

I want to write about the pain. The pain of waking up in the recovery room which is worsened by that immediate sense of loss. Of going in and out of pain and shots. Of the correct position for my arm to drain. The euphoria of the 2nd day, and how it’s been downhill from there.

I want to write of the pain I am feeling right now, of the lukewarm tears that will not stop coming into my eyes—for what? For my lost breast? For the lost me? And which me was that again anyway? For the death I don’t know how to postpone? Or how to meet elegantly? I’m so tired of all this. I want to be the person I used to be, the real me. I feel sometimes that it’s all a dream and surely I’m about to wake up now.

A year ago I was told I had an 80% chance of having breast cancer. That time, the biopsy was negative. But in that interim of three weeks between being told that I might have cancer and finding out it was not so, I met for the first time the essential questions of my own mortality. I was going to die, and it might be a lot sooner than I had ever conceived of. That knowledge did not disappear with the diagnosis of a benign tumor. If not now, I told my lover, then someday. None of us have 300 years. The terror that I conquered in those three weeks left me with a determination and freedom to speak as I needed, and to enjoy and live my life as I needed to for my own meaning.

So this fall I met cancer, as it were, from a considered position, but it still knocked me for a hell of a loop, having to deal with the pain and the fear and the death I thought I had come to terms with once before. I did not recognize then how many faces those terms had, nor how many forces were aligned within our daily structures against them, nor how often I would have to redefine the terms because other experiences kept presenting themselves. The acceptance of death as a fact, rather than the desire to die, can empower my energies with a forcefulness and vigor not always possible when one eye is out unconsciously for eternity.

I kept thinking, I have cancer. I’m a black lesbian feminist poet, how am I going to do this now?

In September 1978, I went into the hospital for a breast biopsy for the second time. It all happened much faster this time than the year before. There was none of the deep dread of the previous biopsy, but at the same time there was none of the excitement of a brand new experience. I said to my surgeon the night before, “I’m a lot more scared this time, but I’m handling it better.” On the surface, at least, we all expected it to be a repeat. My earlier response upon feeling this lump had been, “I’ve been through this once before. What do we do for encore?”

Well, what we did for encore was the real thing. I woke up in the recovery room after the biopsy colder than I can remember ever having been in my life. I was hurting and horrified. I knew it was malignant. How, I didn’t know, but I suspect I had absorbed that fact from the operating room while I still was out. Being “out” really means only that you can’t answer back or protect yourself from what you are absorbing through your ears and other senses. But when I raised my hand in the recovery room and touched both bandaged breasts, I knew there was a malignancy in one, and the other had been biopsied also. It was only for affirmation. I would have given anything to have been warmer right then. The gong in my brain of “malignant,”“malignant,” and the icy sensations of that frigid room, cut through the remnants of anesthesia like a fire hose trained on my brain.

Frances was there by the door of my room like a great sunflower. I surfaced from anesthesia again as she took my hand in her deliciously warm ones, her dear face bent over mine. “It is malignant, isn’t it, Frances, it is malignant,” I said. She squeezed my hand and I saw tears in her eyes. “Yes, my love, it is,” she said, and the anesthesia washed out of me again before the sharp edge of fact.

The decisions seemed much easier. The whole rest of that day seemed a trip back and forth through the small pain in both breasts and my acute awareness of the fact of death in the right one. Off and on I kept thinking. I have cancer. I’m a black lesbian feminist poet, how am I going to do this now? Where are the models for what I’m supposed to be in this situation? But there were none. This is it, Audre. You’re on your own.

I felt inside myself for what I really felt and wanted, and that was to live and to love and to do my work, as hard as I could and for as long as I could.

Even before the biopsy, from the time I was admitted into the hospital Monday afternoon, the network of woman support had been begun by our friends. From the time I woke up to the slow growing warmth of Adrienne’s and Bernice’s and Deanna’s and Michelle’s and Frances’ coats on the bed, I felt Beth Israel Hospital wrapped in a web of woman love and strong wishes of faith and hope for the whole time I was there, and it made self-healing more possible, knowing I was not alone.

Adrienne offered to rise early to park the car for Frances so she could be with me before the operation. Blanche and Clare took the children shopping for school clothes, and helped give them a chance to cut up and laugh in the midst of all this grimness. My sister Helen made chicken soup with homemade dumplings. Bernice gathered material and names and addresses and testimonials for alternative treatments for breast cancer. And through those three days between the biopsy and the mastectomy, good wishes came pouring in by mail and telephone and the door and the psychic ether. To this day, sometimes I feel like a corporate effort, the love and care and concern of so many women having been invested in me with such open heartedness.

I considered the alternatives of the straight medical profession, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. I considered the holistic health approaches of diet, vitamin therapy, experimental immunotherapeutics, west German pancreatic enzymes, and others. The decision whether or not to have a mastectomy ultimately was going to have to be my own. I had always been firm on that point and had chosen a surgeon with that in mind. With the various kinds of information I had gathered together before I went into the hospital, and the additional information acquired in the hectic three days after biopsy, now more than ever before I had to examine carefully the pros and cons of every possibility, while being constantly and acutely aware that so much was still not known.

I felt positively possessed by a rage to live that became an absolute determination to do whatever was necessary to accomplish that living.

I deluged my surgeon with endless questions which he answered in good faith, those that he could. I weighted my options. There were malignant cells in my right breast encased in a fatty cyst, and if I did not do something about that I would die of cancer in fairly short order. Whatever I did might or might not reverse that process, and I would not know with any certainty for a very long time. When it came right down to deciding, as I told Frances later, I felt inside myself for what I really felt and wanted, and that was to live and to love and to do my work, as hard as I could and for as long as I could. So I simply chose the course that I felt most likely to achieve my desire, knowing that I would have paid more than even my beloved breast out of my body to preserve that self that was not merely physically defined, and count it well spent.

I knew that there might come a time when it was clear that surgery had been unnecessary because of the efficacy of alternate therapies. I might be losing my breast in vain. But nothing else was as sure, and it was a price I was willing to pay for life, and I felt I had chosen the wisest course for me. I think now what was most important was not what I chose to do so much as that I was conscious of being able to choose, and having chosen, was empowered from having made a decision, done a strike for myself, moved. Throughout the three days between the mastectomy and the biopsy I felt positively possessed by a rage to live that became an absolute determination to do whatever was necessary to accomplish that living, and I remember wondering if I was strong enough to sustain that determination after I left the hospital. If I left the hospital. For all the deciding and great moral decisions going on, I was shit-scared about another bout with anesthesia. Familiarity with the procedures had not lessened my terror.

I was also afraid that I was not really in control, that it might already be too late to halt the spread of cancer, that there was simply too much to do that I might not get done, that the pain would be just too great. The year before, as I waited almost four weeks for my first biopsy, I had grown angry at my right breast because I felt as if it had in some unexpected way betrayed me, as if it had become already separate from me and had turned against me by creating this tumor which might be malignant. My beloved breast had suddenly departed from the rules we had agreed upon to function by all these years.

But on the day before my mastectomy I wrote in my journal:

September 21, 1978

The anger that I felt for my right breast last year has faded, and I’m glad because I have had this extra year. My breasts have always been so very precious to me since I accepted having them it would have been a shame not to have enjoyed the last year of one of them. And I think I am prepared to lose it now in a way I was not quite ready to last November, because now I really see it as a choice between my breast and my life, and in that view there cannot be any question.

Somehow I always knew this would be the final outcome, for it never did seem like a finished business for me. This year between was like a hiatus, an interregnum in a battle within which I could so easily be a casualty, since I certainly was a warrior. And in that brief time the sun shone and the birds sang and I wrote important words and have loved richly and been loved in return. And if a lifetime of furies is the cause of this death in my right breast, there is still nothing I’ve never been able to accept before that I would accept now in order to keep my breast. It was a 12 month reprieve in which I could come to accept the emotional fact/truths I came to see first in those horrendous weeks last year before the biopsy. If I do what I need to do because I want to do it, it will matter less when death comes, because it will have been an ally that spurred me on.

And yet if I cried for a hundred years I couldn’t possibly express the sorrow I feel right now, the sadness and the loss.

Then through the dope of tranquilizers and grass I remember Frances’ hand on mine, and the last sight of her dear face like a great sunflower in the sky. There is the horror of those flashing lights passing over my face, and the clanging of disemboweled noises that have no context nor relationship to me except they assault me.

I remember screaming and cursing with pain in the recovery room, and I remember a disgusted nurse giving me a shot. I remember a voice telling me to be quiet because there were sick people here, and my saying, well, I have a right, because I’m sick too. Until 5:00 a.m. the next morning, waking was brief seas of localized and intense pain between shots and sleep. At 5:00 a nurse rubbed my back again, helped me get up and go to the bathroom because I couldn’t use the bedpan, and then helped me into a chair. She made me a cup of tea and some fruit juice because I was parched. The pain had subsided a good deal. I could not move my right arm nor my shoulder, both of which were numb, and wrapped around my chest was a wide Ace bandage under which on my left side the mound of my left breast arose, and from which on the right side protruded the ends of white surgical bandages.

I was alive, and it was a very beautiful morning. I drank my tea slowly, and then went back to bed.

From THE CANCER JOURNALS by Audre Lorde, published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LCC. Foreword © 2020 by Tracy K. Smith.

Originally Appeared on Glamour