Kris Klein-Braley, Chicago, October 1996
Kris Klein-Braley, Chicago, October 1996
For me, the intelligence, irreverence and spirit that was Kris most clearly comes into focus as I remember her from our one meeting face to face in Chicago nearly two years ago. In a writing workshop, she wrote a poem called "Cancer Stinks" and then read it aloud to all those assembled there, who gasped and laughed in recognition. It was a blunt, vivid, fearless, focused poem that described aspects of our shared experience in a way no one else could have--and it was generous in a way that was all Kris' own, and typical of her contribution to this list. With her impressive gift for clear, descriptive writing, and her determination to tell the truth about her own experience, she evoked for all of us, over the years that she was part of this list, the real cost that this terrible disease exacts in our lives. With not one iota of self-pity, she documented with wit, self-effacing humor and deadly accuracy what it was like to live with breast cancer, day by day. With intelligence and great warmth, she reached out to so many. Her voice can never be replaced, and she will be terribly missed by me, and by her many other friends around the world on the breast cancer list.
Cancer smells. I don't mean the stink of a septic ulcer or the unpleasant stench of vomit or diarrhea. I mean the more delicate smells which accompany you during your treatment.
The rubber mask and the gas in the operating theatre. The tickle of garlic in the back of your throat as you go under for surgery and the waves of nausea which ebb and flow as you come round.
Ward smells. The special cleaning fluids they use in hospitals. The spirit they dab on you when they change your dressings, the scent of starch and cigarettes from the nurses' skirts. New sheets every day. Hospital meals which even after their removal linger lightly and persistently in the room.
As they assault your body and squirt the toxic red, yellow and blue liquids into your veins, a tidal wave floods up and down inside you until it reaches your nostrils and makes you gag. The scent of your talc in the bathroom every frequent time you wheel the IV and your arm in there to get rid of the liquid they are so generously infusing into your system turns your stomach.
Back home everything smells different too. Fresh bread - wonderful! a normal person would say. No way. It is nauseating, disgusting. The same goes for any perfume, soap, deodorant, hair spray you have previously used. No meal smells or tastes right. Everything is transformed, deformed, so that you eat because you must, indeed because you want to, but holding your nose in disgust at the smells which emanate from the food.
Your own body revolts you. You don't smell like you any more. From every pore oozes the odour of chemo, indescribable but pervasively and constantly present. Freshly laundered clothes smell stale as soon as you put them on. Even the lavender, the roses, the honeysuckle that used to delight you have acquired a sour and unpleasant edge.
It is not only a metaphor. It is one unceasing inexorable assault on the nostrils. Cancer *literally* stinks.