In recovering from breast cancer, author and scientist Becca Lawton confronts the invisibility imposed on the American landscape, this election season and beyond.
Dear America,
Holy smokes, my friend. I haven’t forgotten you. You’ve been on my mind more than ever, though I haven’t shown up for you as I should. Especially in an election year. The election year. Since I vanished, I’ve been able to do only so much. All out of the public eye. But you disappeared, too. Me because of my diagnosis, you because of money—or greed, really, an American dream gone haywire. Know what I’m saying? Just in case, I’ll back up.
In January, I went in for left-breast biopsy. Maybe I told you. Or maybe not, because when my tumor came back positive, I hid out. I had to, with my days gone to surgery and radiation (the gift that keeps on giving, healthwise, but you know about that). Then treatments I never knew existed. Lymphedema physical therapy and post-oncological massage. Survivorship classes and counseling. Three-dimensional screening mammography. Time consuming. All consuming.
What kept me alive through it all? Small-town, neighborly community. Friends and family, bringing in meals. Calling and writing. Offering help. And you did—your beauty. Those parts of you I didn’t hear mentioned in candidate debates and campaigns and media coverage. Small things, to you. Like the things going on right now out my window. A brown creeper climbing the rough bark of our last big Doug-fir. Two spotted fawns who snuck in earlier to munch our native honeysuckle like candy. Not many little gray foxes this year, not since monster firestorms blackened the Mayacamas Mountains five years ago, but a vixen did just rocket past here, tail out and full and flying.
Your creatures, they keep us sane, you and me. They keep us alive. Those men who would be king don’t talk about that, when they’re stumping and speechmaking and spreading their arms to all the applause. They talk economy and stock market and housing—important, but none of it exists without you. Not without your lands and waters and living things.
You could be wearing an invisibility cloak for how often your body is honored in their promises and plans. Your soil and minerals and elements. Myopia, I call it, to not see the gifts of those we love most. We take them for granted. Just look at me, not writing to you for six months.
For that, I apologize. It was part of my general invisibility. In February, I donned one of those cloaks, too, after the surgeons sliced up my tender parts and stitched them back to my body. Scars like Frankenstein running across parts of me I’d assumed would always be there, even if I wished they weren’t so—I don’t know—provocative. Now I get that they were fine and lovely just as they were. And, like you, they were still here.
Not so, in many cases. Over 100,000 mastectomies a year for American women, the surgical removal of both breasts. Not including lumpectomies and partials. Men, too, suffer those same atrocities—and others, for different cancers. Twenty million cases a year globally. Every single survivor dealing with personal dramas, sometimes alone.
I was lucky. I was not alone, and I had time to observe your creatures. My sutures ached and some days I could barely move, but I could see. Beyond the glass of my window, among clusters of redwoods and elderberry, the astounding white-throated sparrows scratched the ground for seeds. One in particular sang from his perch on a fir branch, his head thrown back and throat full of music. Of thee he sang.
You do know what I’m saying. You’ve been cut up, too. A great, wild continent, dotted with sustainable villages whose people lived in precarious balance for millennia. When we invaded, we sliced you and them into portions. Like pie. Meat pie.
Okay, I’m pontificating, but cancer makes you introspective as well as invisible. It comes with a reboot and it comes with vanishing. Good friends who disappear. Others, sometimes strangers, who emerge from the woodwork. Contact lists get a complete overhaul. There’s a name for the syndrome: cancer ghosting.
Ever heard of it? I had not until three months after surgery, when an oncological nurse mentioned it in passing. More common than cancer itself, the abandonment by friends and family of around 90 percent of cancer survivors. (Non-cancer ghosting is closer to 70 percent, just FYI.) With most human cancers on the rise and, the World Health Organization says, projected to rise another 77 percent worldwide by 2050, more of us can expect to ghost in our lifetimes and be ghosted.
No kidding. I say all this because you know there’s anger and shame in not being seen. Not being named. Back in August, when we were both invisible, you went uncredited—your body, the fabric of your being. Your mountains and meadows and rivers and lakes.
Remember August? Who could forget. Two individuals vying for your highest office—the world’s biggest job. Each candidate given 60 seconds to comment on your burning and warming and flooding and rising seas. Global change, called by the United Nations the greatest danger to Homo sapiens in human memory—and it got two minutes.
One candidate knew climate change as an existential threat. One ignored the question, but that’s what he does. Brought it back to himself and how he’s been “treated.” Calls truth a hoax. Plays fast and loose with facts. Lies like a dog. Calls women bitches.
You know all that. And you know the results of that contest. We care and fear and pray about the aftermath like we care and fear and pray for our very lives, and for yours and your change. Which now faces four more years of shrugs, stalls, and stoking the fire.
Believe it or not, global warming has its own cancer connection. Amazingly—or not, given the adaptive nature of DNA—tumors grow in laboratory animals only in the presence of heat. Scientists have known about the heat factor for a long time, but lately, some working at the climate-cancer interface have seen mammalian cells respond to rising temperatures and humidity with both genetic and epigenetic changes (the latter when cell function is altered without rewriting DNA). Some symptoms relate to oxidative stress and inflammation, which drive cancer growth.
Apologies again. I’m talking like the scientist I am. Bottom line, if cancer is the question, slowing the warming is one undeniable answer. And with America the biggest generator, it’s up to us to protect Earth’s wild gifts, which buffer rising temperatures. It’s up to us to nurture resilience in the bountiful world we have left. To cool our jets.
We could start with the war-mongering, our fallback position. Fighting all over the globe punches up warming. There are direct emissions, as in the 1991 Gulf War, with oil fires sending ice-melting soot over Tibet. And indirect emissions, like elevated fuel use for generator function in shelters in Yemen. Those sorts of things. Here, we leveled your forests and Indigenous peoples in the French and Indian War, Revolutionary War, War between the States. We and our allies and protectorates joined in the Great War, War to End All Wars, Cold War, Forever Wars, where we denuded or vaporized entire islands and populations. We ripped uranium and coal and steel from your earth for bombs and bombers. We brought it on—with more deaths and cancers, the Agent Oranges and napalms and lithium lodes of their time.
Survivors emerged so grateful to be alive after losing so many friends to bullets and bayonets that they bred and prospered and spent every breathing moment building out of that aliveness—Big Bands, big families, big dreams. All in the shadow of treaties that pitted new countries against each other, the politics that eventually come home to roost. As they’ve come to Gaza. As they’ve come here, in our red versus blue.
So. My own reconstruction. Now I’m one of millions of women, men, boys, and girls whose bodies become battlegrounds. We bear our cancers and invisibility as you bear yours. And with the campaigning over, and your people at odds and crying for wealth, I want you to know I see you. As sea levels and cancers rise, I see the beauty of your being. And in your own wise way, your laying down carpets of autumn leaves each November (election year or not), your gentle rains that end big wildfires, your grace in trying to slow massive hurricanes before they make landfall, your determined help in my healing and the healing of others—you see us, too.
All my love,
Becca
Becca Lawton is an author, fluvial geologist, former Grand Canyon river guide, and survivor. She lives and writes on an ephemeral stream in northern California steelhead country, at the foot of mountains walked forever by Miwok and Pomo. Visit her at beccalawton.com.
Read Becca Lawton’s interview with Melissa L. Sevigny, “Blush and Rouge in the Grand Canyon.”
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo of white-throated sparrow by Paul Roedding, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Becca Lawton by Paul Christopulos.
