Lord Part 3
Tuesday, 11 July 2000
In a message dated 7/11/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to dewdrop2u:
kim would love to go to coney island, and so would i, in a second, but we cannot make the morning plane.
In a message dated 7/11/00, janeco writes:
i can say goodbye to your hair temporarily but i dont want to say goodbye to you.
In a message dated 7/11/00, ldjose writes:
Don't forget the new relationship is not only with your hats, but more importantly with your pate. HAVE A DATE WITH YOUR PATE!!
Ed's office yesterday. The lump that appeared exactly where the tumor was is healthy new tissue. Don't worry. It's normal.
I feel like a freak, I say to my shrink. I have no style. I have no dignity. I'm marked. I'm a target. You don't look anything like that, she says, carefully. You look remarkable, it's true, but you look like a woman who has taken control. It's fake, I say. It's a performance. Can't you see?
Lunch with Susan S. There were people who wanted to hear about her big breakup, not her cancer. You figure out really fast who can behave like a friend and who can't. Susan doesn't make lists. I do.
kim would love to go to coney island, and so would i, in a second, but we cannot make the morning plane.
In a message dated 7/11/00, janeco writes:
i can say goodbye to your hair temporarily but i dont want to say goodbye to you.
In a message dated 7/11/00, ldjose writes:
Don't forget the new relationship is not only with your hats, but more importantly with your pate. HAVE A DATE WITH YOUR PATE!!
Ed's office yesterday. The lump that appeared exactly where the tumor was is healthy new tissue. Don't worry. It's normal.
I feel like a freak, I say to my shrink. I have no style. I have no dignity. I'm marked. I'm a target. You don't look anything like that, she says, carefully. You look remarkable, it's true, but you look like a woman who has taken control. It's fake, I say. It's a performance. Can't you see?
Lunch with Susan S. There were people who wanted to hear about her big breakup, not her cancer. You figure out really fast who can behave like a friend and who can't. Susan doesn't make lists. I do.
Wednesday, 12 July 2000
In a message dated 7/12/00, lorrgrad writes:
Yes, I have toes and fingers crossed for tomorrow. And look on the bright side. This time you won't wake up with hair in your mouth.
Yes, I have toes and fingers crossed for tomorrow. And look on the bright side. This time you won't wake up with hair in your mouth.
Meditate. When I come out the skin below my eyes is wet, but I can't say that I was crying. [End Page 278]
In a message dated 7/12/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: THE LESBIAN PHALLUS
So far, in the way of coverings, now that I have lost my hair and acquired a pate, I have of course the Fred Segal black knit, or perhaps it is actually the darkest of navies, as well as a floppy-brimmed canvas white, the Uncle Jer's black knit, a gray blue watch cap, a dusky sage green knitted affair that looks to my mind a little too self-deprecating, almost Smith and Hawken in that white-woman-with-time-to-plant-peonies-behold-also-the-trowel-in-complementary-orange-see-page-14 look, a solid black baseball cap, a red and black ZERO PATIENCE cap, water-stained on the brim, a long-ago gift from John Greyson, TWO Kangol black caps, like knitted baseball caps but minus the brim, very Che, except for the white kangaroo in front, but then even though the whole world has gone brand nonetheless I do not think I can pull off Che even if I added a red bandana, a Target entirely synthetic hot pink brimmed fishing cap with black cow spots, a recent gift from Kim's not-at-all-recent ex, four black bandanas, one military camouflage bandana, one bandana with a bit of cobalt to the turquoise, and the promise of a loan of a baseball cap, color unknown, that says JUST DO IT!
I have also acquired certain accessories (lipstick of a dark brownish red described as REVE DE MIEL, thank you Kim, a XENA THE WARRIOR T-shirt, thank you Sue Ellen, and a silver and turquoise ear cuff, thank you Susan). I have reevaluated my collection of necklaces, most of them unworn, many of them gestures intended by my mother to fertilize the stunted signifiers of my femininity. Like color, which does not exist in isolation but is entirely determined by the adjacent colors, the neck, which lies between breasts and [End Page 279] head, is entirely changed by the deletion of hair and the addition of pate. Minus accessories, pate pretty much fills the visual field. No accessories means minimal going on victim. Naked is better on furniture. On a woman of my age, pate spells invalid. InVAlid. A shirt with a high collar helps. Also a V-neck. And a straight spine.
A few weeks ago, at the first meeting of my support group, I was asked to name my greatest fear. Going bald, I answered, without hesitation. Catherine, except for Louanne, who hasn't had chemo yet, most of us are bald, they explain. It hadn't dawned on me that they had gone to a store and bought what was covering their heads. I had thought they were amazingly well groomed for women who presumably felt like shit, and in fact I felt a bit of unproductive and noxious superiority of the politically correct sort about the priority these middle-class women placed on appearances when faced with a life-threatening disease. Underneath this hat, said Suzie, lung cancer, the best-dressed woman in the group, it's baby orangutan, hairless with long wispy patches. If you want to FREAK people out, said Glenda, mother of two, the oldest ten, misread needle biopsy three years ago, double mastectomy and reconstruction—and now let us face it because she has, she is fucked, when my time is up my time is up, that's her mantra, and she has already talked to her children—if you want to FREAK people out, if you're at a party or a dinner or something and you want to REALLY freak them out, this is what you do. Just say, it's so hot, I'm so hot I can't take it, and whip your wig off and throw it on a chair. Then you'll know who can deal. Adriamycin was nothing, Glenda says. Taxol is awful.
So back to pate, which is, by the way, not entirely smooth but prone to five o'clock shadow [End Page 280] along the back and sides. Is there something worse than cancer for a middle-aged dyke? Could I have male pattern baldness? Is pateness—stubble free and silky—something I will have to WORK to maintain for the next five or six months? I have not grown accustomed to my pate, but in an odd and tentative dance, we are becoming acquainted. In order to walk down the street or into a restaurant or into a store, I must both remember my pate and forget that I have it. The memory in muscles and voice carries me through interactions that used to be simple: asking for rice cakes in the health food store, returning a videotape, dropping clothes off at the cleaners. When you face your worst fear you crack, and when you wake up you find out you're not dead, you're bald. The performance you do that is both you and the effect of you, the performance that teaches you who you are and who you can be and who you hope to be, that performance is only partly constructed by your hair, though of course you tend to believe that hair is its motive and necessary force. But my voice still works, along with my eyes, my humor, my stride. The performance performs the performer. If you don't let bald in, neither can other people. The performance will be thick enough to see me through. Collect the stares and use them later.
On the queer side of town, in Silver Lake, I've been reminded in a gesture intended to be reassuring of the similarities between hats and dildos. As Cathy Opie once said of the latter, I love to use them but I'm glad they're removable. Personally, I know that Opie is not in actual fact the first person to float this boat, but now that the ship has sailed and she has left Los Angeles and gone to Yale to be a lesbian, as it were, it's understandable that she would get the credit for some celebrated recent theorizing about gender performance. [End Page 281]
Q: Is hair as unnecessary a protusion as a dick in most social circumstances? Conversely, is hair as much fun as a dick in most social circumstances?
Q: If the penis is located between the legs, and the phallus is located between the ears, where is a lesbian's hair when it is not on her head? (I have kept mine in zip-locked baggies, I confess, in anticipation of a future I do not yet understand, but this is a more literal answer than the sort I have in mind.)
Q: If a straight woman rushes to the wig store (get ready, get it in advance of the chemo, have it waiting so that it will be there when you need it, that's the word on the street), what should a lesbian do? Wigs are tight. Wigs itch. Wigs are about passing. Or are wigs like lipstick? Get over it, apply the signifiers, hit the road.
Q: How come men OWN not only dicks but bald? In this year of the fabulous homeboy/dude/fag—take your pick of race and sexuality and combine as you will—how does a dyke lay claim to bald outside her own house?
Only my lover has so far seen my pate.
In a message dated 7/12/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: THE LESBIAN PHALLUS
So far, in the way of coverings, now that I have lost my hair and acquired a pate, I have of course the Fred Segal black knit, or perhaps it is actually the darkest of navies, as well as a floppy-brimmed canvas white, the Uncle Jer's black knit, a gray blue watch cap, a dusky sage green knitted affair that looks to my mind a little too self-deprecating, almost Smith and Hawken in that white-woman-with-time-to-plant-peonies-behold-also-the-trowel-in-complementary-orange-see-page-14 look, a solid black baseball cap, a red and black ZERO PATIENCE cap, water-stained on the brim, a long-ago gift from John Greyson, TWO Kangol black caps, like knitted baseball caps but minus the brim, very Che, except for the white kangaroo in front, but then even though the whole world has gone brand nonetheless I do not think I can pull off Che even if I added a red bandana, a Target entirely synthetic hot pink brimmed fishing cap with black cow spots, a recent gift from Kim's not-at-all-recent ex, four black bandanas, one military camouflage bandana, one bandana with a bit of cobalt to the turquoise, and the promise of a loan of a baseball cap, color unknown, that says JUST DO IT!
I have also acquired certain accessories (lipstick of a dark brownish red described as REVE DE MIEL, thank you Kim, a XENA THE WARRIOR T-shirt, thank you Sue Ellen, and a silver and turquoise ear cuff, thank you Susan). I have reevaluated my collection of necklaces, most of them unworn, many of them gestures intended by my mother to fertilize the stunted signifiers of my femininity. Like color, which does not exist in isolation but is entirely determined by the adjacent colors, the neck, which lies between breasts and [End Page 279] head, is entirely changed by the deletion of hair and the addition of pate. Minus accessories, pate pretty much fills the visual field. No accessories means minimal going on victim. Naked is better on furniture. On a woman of my age, pate spells invalid. InVAlid. A shirt with a high collar helps. Also a V-neck. And a straight spine.
A few weeks ago, at the first meeting of my support group, I was asked to name my greatest fear. Going bald, I answered, without hesitation. Catherine, except for Louanne, who hasn't had chemo yet, most of us are bald, they explain. It hadn't dawned on me that they had gone to a store and bought what was covering their heads. I had thought they were amazingly well groomed for women who presumably felt like shit, and in fact I felt a bit of unproductive and noxious superiority of the politically correct sort about the priority these middle-class women placed on appearances when faced with a life-threatening disease. Underneath this hat, said Suzie, lung cancer, the best-dressed woman in the group, it's baby orangutan, hairless with long wispy patches. If you want to FREAK people out, said Glenda, mother of two, the oldest ten, misread needle biopsy three years ago, double mastectomy and reconstruction—and now let us face it because she has, she is fucked, when my time is up my time is up, that's her mantra, and she has already talked to her children—if you want to FREAK people out, if you're at a party or a dinner or something and you want to REALLY freak them out, this is what you do. Just say, it's so hot, I'm so hot I can't take it, and whip your wig off and throw it on a chair. Then you'll know who can deal. Adriamycin was nothing, Glenda says. Taxol is awful.
So back to pate, which is, by the way, not entirely smooth but prone to five o'clock shadow [End Page 280] along the back and sides. Is there something worse than cancer for a middle-aged dyke? Could I have male pattern baldness? Is pateness—stubble free and silky—something I will have to WORK to maintain for the next five or six months? I have not grown accustomed to my pate, but in an odd and tentative dance, we are becoming acquainted. In order to walk down the street or into a restaurant or into a store, I must both remember my pate and forget that I have it. The memory in muscles and voice carries me through interactions that used to be simple: asking for rice cakes in the health food store, returning a videotape, dropping clothes off at the cleaners. When you face your worst fear you crack, and when you wake up you find out you're not dead, you're bald. The performance you do that is both you and the effect of you, the performance that teaches you who you are and who you can be and who you hope to be, that performance is only partly constructed by your hair, though of course you tend to believe that hair is its motive and necessary force. But my voice still works, along with my eyes, my humor, my stride. The performance performs the performer. If you don't let bald in, neither can other people. The performance will be thick enough to see me through. Collect the stares and use them later.
On the queer side of town, in Silver Lake, I've been reminded in a gesture intended to be reassuring of the similarities between hats and dildos. As Cathy Opie once said of the latter, I love to use them but I'm glad they're removable. Personally, I know that Opie is not in actual fact the first person to float this boat, but now that the ship has sailed and she has left Los Angeles and gone to Yale to be a lesbian, as it were, it's understandable that she would get the credit for some celebrated recent theorizing about gender performance. [End Page 281]
Q: Is hair as unnecessary a protusion as a dick in most social circumstances? Conversely, is hair as much fun as a dick in most social circumstances?
Q: If the penis is located between the legs, and the phallus is located between the ears, where is a lesbian's hair when it is not on her head? (I have kept mine in zip-locked baggies, I confess, in anticipation of a future I do not yet understand, but this is a more literal answer than the sort I have in mind.)
Q: If a straight woman rushes to the wig store (get ready, get it in advance of the chemo, have it waiting so that it will be there when you need it, that's the word on the street), what should a lesbian do? Wigs are tight. Wigs itch. Wigs are about passing. Or are wigs like lipstick? Get over it, apply the signifiers, hit the road.
Q: How come men OWN not only dicks but bald? In this year of the fabulous homeboy/dude/fag—take your pick of race and sexuality and combine as you will—how does a dyke lay claim to bald outside her own house?
Only my lover has so far seen my pate.
Thursday, 13 July 2000
Chemo Two. David will take me to Cedars, Kim will meet me. I am getting sicker, but sick is an abstraction. I'm a cipher in other people's calculations of degeneration. The yardstick is fatigue. The translations are tired. It's no picnic. It will be a rough patch. It's the pits. The days will end earlier. I am already exhausted.
My mother calls, to hover and to retreat at the same time, also to give me the only strategy she knows, which is to repeat that I will get through it.
My mother calls, to hover and to retreat at the same time, also to give me the only strategy she knows, which is to repeat that I will get through it.
Saturday, 15 July 2000
In a message dated 7/15/00, kenm writes:
It's a small world. I've heard. My mother had chemo and then they implanted something radioactive in her. [End Page 282]
In a message dated 7/15/00, whyrain writes:
JESUS, Catherine, I always knew you were capable of the most Wittgensteinian ruminations, but baldness has apparently sent you into the philosophical ether. Losing a breast (even losing one's life?) hath no terrors equal to losing this first and last visible signifier of female virility. I remember years ago when I told Nancy Graves my hair was falling out and my mother had hardly any hair left at the end of her life, she said something to the effect that this was one thing that was just not "acceptable" for women. A huge no-no. And now that I've found a hairstyle that suits the inexorable genetic progress of hair erasure, it gives me pause to reflect on the whole megillah of pateness, as you put it. I see no reason for you to fret about showing your head to no one but Kim. I fantasize feeling and kissing and patting it.
In a message dated 7/15/00, kenm writes:
It's a small world. I've heard. My mother had chemo and then they implanted something radioactive in her. [End Page 282]
In a message dated 7/15/00, whyrain writes:
JESUS, Catherine, I always knew you were capable of the most Wittgensteinian ruminations, but baldness has apparently sent you into the philosophical ether. Losing a breast (even losing one's life?) hath no terrors equal to losing this first and last visible signifier of female virility. I remember years ago when I told Nancy Graves my hair was falling out and my mother had hardly any hair left at the end of her life, she said something to the effect that this was one thing that was just not "acceptable" for women. A huge no-no. And now that I've found a hairstyle that suits the inexorable genetic progress of hair erasure, it gives me pause to reflect on the whole megillah of pateness, as you put it. I see no reason for you to fret about showing your head to no one but Kim. I fantasize feeling and kissing and patting it.
Sunday, 16 July 2000
In a message dated 7/16/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: THE MAN WHO WAS ABSENT FROM THE FORUM OF HIS OWN DEVICES
Kim is meeting me at an expensive restaurant in New York. The owner brings her to the back, which turns out to be her bedroom. The owner takes out a sex toy, a long green wiggly thing with a right angle in the middle and an elbow from which something red protrudes, like the flower on the orchid Kim had been watering yesterday afternoon. It was the most beautiful sex toy Kim had ever seen. The owner asked Kim to make love to her, so Kim began touching her breasts, but then she realized she couldn't fuck the woman because it would hurt me. Also, she noticed that the woman had no legs. Kim felt that the woman would take rejection hard, and so, with more than a bit of regret, as she was feeling very butch, she told the woman that she was waiting for her girlfriend. The good ones are always [End Page 283] taken, said the woman. I came into the restaurant in a long cape with a hood that looked like long hair, but when I pulled the hood back I had very, very short hair underneath. I was more radiant than Kim had ever seen me. She watched heads turning as I moved through the room. When she looked back the restaurant woman had her legs again, but she didn't have pubic hair.
It's your dream, I say, but it sounds to me like the old me versus the new me.
Whatever choice I made, it was still you, says Kim.
In a message dated 7/16/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: THE MAN WHO WAS ABSENT FROM THE FORUM OF HIS OWN DEVICES
Kim is meeting me at an expensive restaurant in New York. The owner brings her to the back, which turns out to be her bedroom. The owner takes out a sex toy, a long green wiggly thing with a right angle in the middle and an elbow from which something red protrudes, like the flower on the orchid Kim had been watering yesterday afternoon. It was the most beautiful sex toy Kim had ever seen. The owner asked Kim to make love to her, so Kim began touching her breasts, but then she realized she couldn't fuck the woman because it would hurt me. Also, she noticed that the woman had no legs. Kim felt that the woman would take rejection hard, and so, with more than a bit of regret, as she was feeling very butch, she told the woman that she was waiting for her girlfriend. The good ones are always [End Page 283] taken, said the woman. I came into the restaurant in a long cape with a hood that looked like long hair, but when I pulled the hood back I had very, very short hair underneath. I was more radiant than Kim had ever seen me. She watched heads turning as I moved through the room. When she looked back the restaurant woman had her legs again, but she didn't have pubic hair.
It's your dream, I say, but it sounds to me like the old me versus the new me.
Whatever choice I made, it was still you, says Kim.
Monday, 17 July 2000
Baking soda baths. Alice down a long long tunnel. Perhaps I should skip radiation and go back for a mastectomy. Whatever, Kim says. I'm not into normativity.
Baking soda baths. Alice down a long long tunnel. Perhaps I should skip radiation and go back for a mastectomy. Whatever, Kim says. I'm not into normativity.
Tuesday, 18 July 2000
In a message dated 7/18/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: WIG OUT
Wig out? reads the entirety of John Mason Kirby's reply to one of my e-mails. WIG OUT, I shoot back. A reminder that there might be a simple "solution" to my rantings? A question about whether the rantings indicate that I am in fact wigging out and should be fussed over in ways other than my appearance?
But wig IS out of the proverbial hat. I have crossed off my list the possibility of a substitute, a replacement, a temporary solution, thus implying a temporary problem, a fling. Not even a red nylon Cher mane. No hirsute dildos for Miss Natural. Somewhere back there, right after the lesbian haircut, wig went out, wig landed in the garbage, wig no longer tweaked the tender buttons, wig stayed on the store shelves. Wig would look wig, and cost plenty. It is true that for a while, before the short [End Page 284] haircut, I entertained the fantasy of a dread wig. (I see now that this was an unnecessarily elaborate way to refuse in advance to pass.)
Wig was replaced by curiosity about my bare skull. More important, without being aware of any point at which I could be said to have made a decision, I realize that I want to be marked by baldness as a woman with cancer undergoing chemo, as a woman confronting her mortality. In fact, before I noticed that the decision had arrived in me, I was already marked. Something has been knifed inside me, and I do not want to lose the external sign of that wound.
I am in the profound place, Kim says, and though whenever there is a house with lights on by the side of the road, she promises to be in it, in truth I am on my own journey alone at dusk with my little kerchief of precious things.
Baldness is a scar. I want my scar. I want to be able to put my hands on it and have the wind touch it, to rub comfrey salve into it and to feel the rises and hollows of my skull without hair scratching and skidding under my fingertips. I don't want to shop to cover my scar, which will at any rate fade and heal, just as the ones on my breast and under my right arm are doing. I do not want to pass. I do not want to go gently back into the world of people who are afraid of looking into the eyes of someone whose chances of dying in the near future are better than theirs by a long shot, or so they need to believe. Baldness becomes me, in a literal sort of way, a hell of a lot better than a pink ribbon, though it is true that I wear more jewelry than I did previously. Here's the outfit for Chemo Two: black baggy pants, gray cotton knit pullover, black skullcap, bead bracelets. I understand now the woman in the pink jumpsuit and the strappy white sandals who I stared at when I went for my first consultation [End Page 285] with the illustrious Dr. Van Scoy-Mosher. She was dressed for chemo. She was on her feet, holding it together, rummaging in her purse for her ten-dollar copayment. She looked a lot better than the other people in the waiting room but her face was bright red and she didn't look good and I still wanted to believe that wouldn't be me. I wouldn't wear pink to chemo, I decided.
You can only do the drag you know. She lives in Beverly Hills, or so I imagine, and I live in Silver Lake.
In a message dated 7/18/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: WIG OUT
Wig out? reads the entirety of John Mason Kirby's reply to one of my e-mails. WIG OUT, I shoot back. A reminder that there might be a simple "solution" to my rantings? A question about whether the rantings indicate that I am in fact wigging out and should be fussed over in ways other than my appearance?
But wig IS out of the proverbial hat. I have crossed off my list the possibility of a substitute, a replacement, a temporary solution, thus implying a temporary problem, a fling. Not even a red nylon Cher mane. No hirsute dildos for Miss Natural. Somewhere back there, right after the lesbian haircut, wig went out, wig landed in the garbage, wig no longer tweaked the tender buttons, wig stayed on the store shelves. Wig would look wig, and cost plenty. It is true that for a while, before the short [End Page 284] haircut, I entertained the fantasy of a dread wig. (I see now that this was an unnecessarily elaborate way to refuse in advance to pass.)
Wig was replaced by curiosity about my bare skull. More important, without being aware of any point at which I could be said to have made a decision, I realize that I want to be marked by baldness as a woman with cancer undergoing chemo, as a woman confronting her mortality. In fact, before I noticed that the decision had arrived in me, I was already marked. Something has been knifed inside me, and I do not want to lose the external sign of that wound.
I am in the profound place, Kim says, and though whenever there is a house with lights on by the side of the road, she promises to be in it, in truth I am on my own journey alone at dusk with my little kerchief of precious things.
Baldness is a scar. I want my scar. I want to be able to put my hands on it and have the wind touch it, to rub comfrey salve into it and to feel the rises and hollows of my skull without hair scratching and skidding under my fingertips. I don't want to shop to cover my scar, which will at any rate fade and heal, just as the ones on my breast and under my right arm are doing. I do not want to pass. I do not want to go gently back into the world of people who are afraid of looking into the eyes of someone whose chances of dying in the near future are better than theirs by a long shot, or so they need to believe. Baldness becomes me, in a literal sort of way, a hell of a lot better than a pink ribbon, though it is true that I wear more jewelry than I did previously. Here's the outfit for Chemo Two: black baggy pants, gray cotton knit pullover, black skullcap, bead bracelets. I understand now the woman in the pink jumpsuit and the strappy white sandals who I stared at when I went for my first consultation [End Page 285] with the illustrious Dr. Van Scoy-Mosher. She was dressed for chemo. She was on her feet, holding it together, rummaging in her purse for her ten-dollar copayment. She looked a lot better than the other people in the waiting room but her face was bright red and she didn't look good and I still wanted to believe that wouldn't be me. I wouldn't wear pink to chemo, I decided.
You can only do the drag you know. She lives in Beverly Hills, or so I imagine, and I live in Silver Lake.
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Discussion of "Lord Part 3"
Accessories
Accessories of all kinds engage one's gender or sexual identity in the way that they explicitly mark one's self in a unique and one-of-a-kind way, but because of the culture we live in, each is coded to signify specific "types" gender and/or sexuality (i.e. dresses as women's wear or short, boy-like hair cuts for lesbians).Posted on 23 April 2013, 4:07 am by Jade Ulrich | Permalink
In Her Own TIme
Here the work of Barbara Myherhoff seems beyond relevant. An visual anthropologist, working at USC, and studying Hasidic Jews in LA, as she became sick with cancer she found herself needing/becoming her subjects/self (new kind of visual social scientist): first for wigs, but then for spiritual wisdom and community, and rituals for healing.Posted on 23 April 2013, 4:47 pm by Alexandra Juhasz | Permalink
again with the hair.
This quote stuck out to me in the reading. "A few weeks ago, at the first meeting of my support group, I was asked to name my greatest fear. Going bald, I answered, without hesitation." As mentioned in previous comments, it is astonishing how her hair meant so much to her, essentially more than her life. Was she not as afraid of dying? going frail? loosing control of her body? not being able to take care of herself? All of these things, I would surely mention if I would be in the same situation. But loss of hair means more and represents her more than loss of control. Her hair is a definition point for her and something that she can physically hold on to which is why it may be so hard to let go of. Her comment makes you think about being a woman in society and how that hair can help you define who you are, which is why it is such an impossible loss to her. While I may think hair isn't meaningful to my life, she can not say the same. An interesting realization for me.Posted on 25 April 2013, 3:53 am by sophy | Permalink
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