Phoenix Rising. Beyond Breast Cancer.

They say grief doesn’t get smaller but that you get larger if you allow the vessel of your life to grow larger around it. It’s been five years since I lost my husband and my breast to cancer. In this time, I’ve learned that “larger” takes on forms one might not imagine at the point of loss.

Dazed survival mode
on the shores of grief,
building sandcastles
out of ashes.
I didn’t know
I was sitting in ashes.
Ashes make poor sandcastles.

I wanted to have a phoenix tattooed on my mastectomy side. My breast surgeon advised I wait a few years because I opted out of radiation/chemo to treat what may have been left behind in the skin tissue (my margins weren’t clean). Having lost Ray just months before, I couldn’t imagine going through the combination of chemo and grief with a successful outcome. A holistic approach sustained my fragile will to live while my body cleaned house.

Dream Weaving A Crone’s Delight

A friend and I were joking, one morning, about the effects of gravity and later-in-life dating. She was on her way to pick up a set of room darkening curtains in preparation for “afternoon delight” with a young lover. We both agreed that our sensual nature had not diminished with age and laughed about her desire to “set the stage.”

My muse must have been listening in because, after we hung up, she dropped this line on me.

She had a one candle body
but her passion lit the room.

Who was this woman with such passion that she could light a room? Images of darkened meeting places and intertwining body parts beckoned me. I wanted to know her story. I waited for more.

My muse fell silent. Muses are such teases.