AFTER DYING, IT'S THE GREATEST...

. . .fear I have. Finding the lump. Feeling it move, roll under my fingers, making me think of that childhood story, "The Princess and the Pea." My mind veers, makes jokes. Even now, as I write this, I'm thinking of ways to make it funny. To me, though, it can never be funny.

Breast cancer seems to have a genetic component, though the studies vary. I take hope from the new ones that say maybe family history's not as much a factor as yesterday's studies showed it to be. But to the extent that blood's a conduit even for a predisposition for the disease, I'm at risk, and the numbers scare me. One in seven, maybe only one in eight. Cold comfort.

Yet I make jokes. In the clinic after my first mammogram years ago, when the nurse set the silicone breast model on the table in front of me and told me to feel the different kinds of lumps--typically benign, typically malignant--I snickered and said, "Quick, get it a bra!" That model felt awfully real. It felt just about exactly like my own breast--was more or less the same size, with a (typically-benign) cluster of little knots in the upper quadrant where my breast sometimes felt lumpy a week or so before I got my period. "Something like this would make a great party favor," I told the nurse, "for a certain kind of party." And I snickered again.

In truth I was terrified. That silicone felt like flesh. And embedded in it was death I could feel with my fingertips: a pea-sized nodule, quite firm, that moved easily under my touch, and a larger mass, less discrete, anchored more firmly in place. I poked it, I prodded it, imagined tendrils, tentacles burrowing into surrounding tissue, digging in, holding on.

I took my hand away. Folded my arms across my chest. Did I know what to look for when I did my self-exam? the nurse asked. "When you're shaped like I am," I retorted, "first you have to look for your breasts!" I was still laughing when I left the clinic. The minute I got into my car, though, I started to shake. I put my head down on the steering wheel; I gripped the wheel hard with both hands. Later, when a friend asked me how the experience had been, I told her that it put a whole new slant on the phrase "to have one's tit in a wringer."

In November, 1961, I returned home after five months in Europe. I'd written to tell my mother when I'd arrive, and assumed she'd be available to pick me up at the airport. She wasn't there. In those pre-phone-machine days, if the person you were calling didn't answer you kept trying until you gave up. I kept trying for probably two hours, but it was getting late and I was tired. A little peeved as well, to tell the truth. Here I was, the prodigal daughter, home from her beatnik wanderings. The least a good mother could do, seemed to me, was provide taxi service from the airport.

At last I called a friend and told her my sad tale: no Mom to meet my plane. She'd better have a good excuse, I said. She does, said my friend. Her voice sounded odd. Let me come get you, she said. Which she did, she and her husband; they took me to their house and fed me and poured me a stiff drink, and told me that my mother was in the hospital--that the day before she'd had a radical mastectomy. "They hope they got it all."

My mother was old-family Southern. She believed in appearances, in the stiff upper lip, at least in public. Emotional display was...peasant, or something. Like me, she was a joker; like me, she used humor as a shield and a defense. And so I wasn't too surprised, when I peered in around the edge of her hospital door the next morning, that she greeted me with a wink and said, "Some people will do anything to get their daughter's attention."

"Yeah, well," I responded, quick as you please, "I've heard of giving your pound of flesh, but this is ridiculous."

My mother was one of the lucky ones. They did "get it all"; she lived another fifteen years and died of an unrelated condition. Yet she lived those fifteen years as--in her own eyes--a mutilated woman, a non-woman. Sexless and repulsive. She said to me once, "I'm glad your father isn't alive to see me." No one saw. No one but doctors and nurses, for the rest of her life. Certainly not I. And not the nice man who courted her for more than a year when she was in her early 70's and the scar more than a dozen years faded. In her mind it stayed raw, flayed flesh, a wound where a piece of her had been, and been torn away. Too self-conscious to be fitted for a prosthesis, too filled with shame and self-disgust to go defiantly without, she stuffed her left bra cup with cotton or Kleenex, and then plucked obsessively at the buttons at the neck of her blouse, lest they gap open and betray her. She had nightmares (she told me) in which cotton puffs fell out of her bra onto the floor, or shifted position and people stared. We joked about it. Had a whole series of Falsie Disaster and Wandering Boob stories that we'd tell each other, laughing till we cried.

All false, of course, even the tears. We were wearing emotional prostheses, both of us. Neither of us able to say what needed to be said. I never asked her. . .anything. And I wanted to know. . .so many things. What had she felt--under her fingers and in her gut and in her soul--when she first felt the lump? What did it feel like to know there was a real chance you'd just discovered you had cancer; that there was a real chance you'd lose your breast; a real chance you'd just met the thing that would kill you. What does it feel like, waiting for the doctor to see you, hearing whatever he tells you, going home to prepare to go to the hospital, checking in, talking to the surgeon, sliding under the anesthesia knowing if the biopsy goes one way you'll wake up with a bandaid on your tit, and if it goes the other you'll wake up minus a breast, minus a great swath of muscle and lymph nodes, minus part of two ribs.

That's the part I want to know about. How could you go under, not knowing? Yet women do it. Over and over, under they go, not knowing. And some wake to bandaids, it's true. My mother woke to sterile dressings and drainage tubes, glad for the first time in eleven years that her husband wasn't around to see her. Falsie Disasters. Wandering Boobs. Can you imagine?

She recovered, she was cured, they got it all. But she never got over it, and I'm not over it either. I'm at an age where my doctor talks to me about estrogen, for preventing bone loss. But what about increased risk? I ask. I don't have to say what risk I mean. He shrugs. Which studies do I want to believe? I'm a nordic type--tall, light coloring, long limbs--a risk group for osteoporosis--another condition I don't want. It's a crapshoot, he says. No one really knows.

I want to know why no one knows. I want diseases of women to be treated with the same urgency as diseases of men. My mother isn't the only one of my close relatives to have had breast cancer. A first cousin died of it, and it's out there in the branches as well. I could get it. I could have it now, despite the reassurance of my recent annual x-ray. Because by the time the mammo detects it, it's been in the breast tissue for four or five years; it could already have started to metastasize; it could already be too late. I try not to think like that. I try to keep a positive attitude. I try to focus on the mathematical fact that even with the worst-case odds I've heard, one in four, that still leaves the other 75% for me to get lost in.

And I try to believe that even if the worst happens I'll be a candidate for a lumpectomy, and if I'm not I'll buy pretty vests and wear a button that says Amazon. No way I'm going the Falsie Disaster route. No Wandering Boobs for me.

And yet I'm enough my mother's daughter to believe that, if it comes down to me on a gurney, rolling toward surgery in a Demerol haze, I won't be honest. I won't tell anyone how scared I am, or how angry. I'll grope for the old grin reflex. "Hey Doc," I'll quip. "Why not take two, they're small."

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