Cancer Season #1 - Water with Audre Lorde

Below is the full text of the podcast episode - almost exactly the same, plus some visuals and tiny extra bits, you can choose your media of choice to go down this strange road with me <3

Friends, beloveds, Witches, the demure and the curious, the filthy and wild, the sick and the... well??? Welcome home to the coven we make here in the dark between our ears. Welcome to a strange new season of the Missing Witches podcast. Usually here, starting at the Fall Equinox we begin a 6 episode season telling stories of real people who help us understand what we mean these days when we cackle and invoke witchcraft. When we go looking for the witches we’ve been missing. We typically spend the summer researching and writing those stories, but this summer I was diagnosed with cancer, and Amy had her land wash away in a flood leaving a crumbling wound right at the edge of the home she and her husband had built with their bare hands, and we find ourselves on a precipice.

We’re here, we want to be here with you, and we come bearing stories; but we can’t guarantee what shapes they’ll take. They’re still metastasizing. 

I’m going to begin with a miniature Cancer season, episodes drawn from the elements. And while these episodes won’t be solely devoted to telling true stories about missing witches, there will be witches here, wise women who walked this cancer path before me. I’m going to start with the Water. I’m going to follow Audre Lorde.

On June 3, 2024 I went with my husband Marc to get the results from a biopsy of my left breast and a lymph node. The biopsy was way more painful than I'd been expecting and had left me with the loud stapler sound of the ultrasound-guided biopsy machine ringing in my ear and blood splattered all down my side and back, but still, I wasn't expecting cancer.

I'd been losing weight for almost two years, I was bone tired a lot of the time but I always joked "I'm 43 with a 5-year-old of course I'm tired." I danced - all knees and elbows, awkward white lady - in the tiny room Marc and I waited in to meet the doctor, to shake off my nerves and to make Marc laugh, because he was more scared than I, having lost his mother to cancer suddenly the year before. And then she came in, petite and sad-eyed and told me that the biopsy had come back positive and so I would have a meeting with the surgical team the following week. She embraced me. She told me “our goal is that you survive.”

I can't tell the whole rest of the story now, I can't manage it in any kind of order. I'm writing you from one-week post-surgery, and I'll publish this in another week or 5, and life will keep crashing on us all like waves. A part of coping with the identity head-fuck of all this is that it gets to a tipping point where words are forcing themselves out of my ears and eyeballs. Everything is water-shaped and nothing here is linear.

I am a Cancer baby, astrologically speaking. My birthday is July 15th, I celebrated 44 one week before having my breasts cut empty. Our element is water. I wrote before about a kinship with undammed rivers, I am a water person, always bursting my banks, always weeping from joy, sorrow, rage, exhaustion or nostalgia, always game for swimming or dancing in the rain. 

In the book Amy Torok and I co-wrote together about anti-capitalist tools for resistance and re-enchantment, called New Moon Magic, in the chapter called The Body, in honour of the new moon in May, the month when I first felt the lump and had the biopsy, years ago I had written:

“For this new moon, we turn our attention to our bodies. How we move through the world and also how the world moves through us. The nervous system is a vast web of sensors. The lymphatic system is a network of vessels that carry a clear fluid called lymph toward the heart. This fluid that moves through us takes its name from lympha, the deities of freshwater. Lympha bring inspiration, even a creative frenzy, one that can overturn all acceptable behavior and social norms. We carry within us a vast network of sizzling vessels alchemizing what comes into contact with our porous selves”

The lymph nodes are the underground rivers and wells of these, our haunted temples, and mine were carrying cells that had lost the plot, mad with a growth mentality, so intent upon extraction and expansion, flipping tables, overturning the acceptable behavior of cells, that they could wind up killing their host and themselves in the process. 

I walked loops around the lake waiting on test results until my fear brain was like a fever.

Back home and sweaty I changed into my vintage brown bathing suit with the purple and tomato red gardenias and walked quickly into the lake. The water was high, the stone steps submerged, the lake halfway up the beach, the ancient horsetail, living fossils, had become bright green coral. I swam hard to the middle thinking about being strong, then froze thinking maybe the movement sends cancer cells pumping through my lymphatic system faster. I dove down and screamed with my eyes open in the murky depths shot through with light “please lake please please protect me for May”. 

And so maybe it’s not such a surprise that later that day when May took to the water she suddenly felt held. She floated on her back for the first time this season.

Shortly after this, I got the results from the nuclear bone scan and the MRI and the CT scan and learned that it hadn't metastasized into my bones, liver or lungs. I would need a mastectomy, and a lymph node dissection, and chemotherapy, and radiation, but after that my 5 year survival odds were over 70%. 

My friend Emilie drove up with her daughter Ivy for a sleepover, and after Ivy had asked us to come out and play for the twentieth time because she said the wind was making her spooked - and there was a wildness to it, the way the wind can be so bodied in full summer in trees thick with blowing leaves - I said, would you like to do a ritual with me? And her eyes lit up as kids always do and she said yes. Suddenly Emilie was out of her phone too, we went outside, and I had May show them the heart-shaped clover that taste like sweet lemon and how to recognize Heal All and where to find lavender and wild strawberries and we poured water into a beautiful stone bowl Marc had brought back from Japan and set it in front of the stone circle where we make our fires. 

Then we went down to the lake together and washed our hands and faces laughing at how warm the water felt in the cold wind. 

Then I let the girls pull treasures out of my black velvet Jinkx Monsoon bag: a pink rose quartz ball which Ivy clutched to her chest. A felted ball made with layer after layer of colour and cut open to reveal the secret labours underneath that May had made at her hippie school before summer vacation which she claimed like a talisman from a long long time ago. A heart which I had made with gentle witch artist Lorraine in a 5 hour ritual workshop where we took broken things, symbols of loss and betrayal or whatever needed tending, and wrapped and stitched and wrapped and twisted and stitched with beloved scraps of fabric into a shape like a heliacal heart which Emilie chose. And finally, a broach of jewel red roses sent to me by my poet friend Kenneth who travels the world with the most famous drag artists there are, who is the reason I have a black velvet bag from Jinkx Monsoon, and who practices a deep and quiet backstage magic that lets him see right into the hearts of people like me and hand them a perfect treasure. That talisman was for me. It was with me at my wedding. I didn’t wear it but kept it in my pocket so a I could grip it’s metal edges tightly in my fist. 

We held these and pulled out the white sage, braided sweet grass and eagle feather which my brother-in-law’s friend Isaiah, gentle Mi'kmaq gardener had sent me upon hearing about my cancer. And I told this tiny coven - so fleetingly assembled, though the little girls had known each other since before they were born, their cells in each other’s orbits since their mothers were teenagers watching Kids in the Hall on repeat and laughing till we cried, singing REMs Night Swimming in a way that suggested one day we would know what it meant - I told them that Isaiah had said not to worry about doing it wrong, anything done with love our ancestors would receive with love. And I told them I didn’t know what to sing, so I sang a song I’d learned in school maybe, or at church camp, it was an appropriation certainly but at its heart true, and I felt Isaiah had known about this moment exactly, and I remembered Amy shrugging and laughing when we improvised the ingredients for our first spells and saying “well, the Goddess forgives.”

We kept singing till the little girls got it, and we lit the white sage for cleansing, which I don’t use unless an Indigenous person like Isaiah has given it to me with permission, and when I do my eyes fill with tears at being treated to so kindly after so many generations of theft. We lit it with a bic lighter and May waved the feather around us and washed us clean. We put the sweet plants into the water with our hopes. And then Emilie lit the braid of sweetgrass and we didn’t know which end to light and we felt all wrong again, but the goddess forgives and the kids don’t have shame all baked in everywhere yet and we washed the smoke over each other and told them it filled up every clean place with sweetness. And Emilie and I, our eyes shone with tears, but then Ivy took a fist full of clover out of the bowl and shoved it in her mouth and we laughed and passed the bowl between us sipping it and feeling light and green, and then Marc called us in for breakfast. 

I asked the girls to give the water back to the lake but they forgot and it sat out all night, beneath the first quarter moon. In the morning I found it covered in dew on the picnic table and I brought it in and poured it through a metal sieve into a mason jar. I imagined it blessed by the growing moon, the growing kids, the fat summer and I felt like it was calling out to my courage. I took the wet, sweet smelling leaves and muddled wild berries from the sieve outside and walked through the high wildflowers and grasses calling “hey snake” so they’d get out of my way till I found the altar stone where I’d buried my placenta all those years ago, and I wiped the lavender and Heal-All and st johns wort and clover on her like a paste. Here love, we all still connected through this alter stone and down into the soil where our cells seep into the earth beneath the stone into the foundations of my home all these years later, you take this too. Draw it into our foundations. Let it stain and sustain us.  

Back inside, I ran the shower and cleaned myself. I always felt the strangeness in my left breast in the shower, my hand strayed towards it hundreds of times a day. Right before I got out, I poured the cold moon water on my breasts and held them, then baptized my head. I didn’t believe this would take the cancer from me. But I asked it to hold me anyway. I don’t know exactly how to explain it except it’s beautiful, it’s better than the terror stance, the fugue state, the tv coma, the crying, the other ways I passed that time. 

After surgery, my friend Inna came to visit with her daughter Yasmine and her partner Sam, and the dads and the kids swam while we sat together on the porch. I sat in a recliner and Inna balanced on a tiny hard stool rather than sit the couch so she could be right by me and hold my hand. She brought me a tisane to help me sleep and told me she’d asked her friend, who is a doctor, if there was a tisane to help with my pain and nausea after surgery and general anesthetic? And the doctor had said “no, Inna, there’s no tea for that” and we laughed. 

She brought me a copy of Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer, a story about descending into the land of the dead, losing everything, and coming back. And she brought me a mason jar of water which she had charged with friends under the solstice strawberry moon, after a day of labour together laughing and stuffing vine leaves. She said: I asked them to send their strength to my intention. I held you in my heart then and I have been all days since.” Then she looked at me a little skeptically and said, “look it sat out in the yard all night under the moon, and then it sat on my shelf for a bit, maybe don’t put it near your stitches or anything.” I laughed again and promised not to. 

A few days later I got my drains out, the plastic tubes that came from deep inside me and drew red yellow liquid into little bulbs I had worn in an apron around my waist for two weeks. A week after that I was allowed to shower for the first time.

Marc had taken May on a two night canoe trip, intent on making this cancer summer one of magic for her. My mom and sister stayed to care for me, my sister swam across the lake by herself for the first time, we gathered our strength. On shower day they hovered and wanted to help but I gently closed the door and they understood. I could lift my arms enough now to get out of my clothes, to pull the last bandages off, to stand naked in the mirror with my strange but familiar self. In the shower I washed my own hair for the first time in weeks, I tended to my skin with gentle soaps, in awe of this moment of being alive. I opened the jar from Inna and called out to Inanna, Venus, Brigid, Melusine, the Moon, all my coven, all the people who had offered prayers in the languages and frameworks that made sense to them, I felt them run through all of them into the water rushing over me and thanked them and told them: chemo is coming, please continue to carry me, please let the road rise up to meet me as I continue my descent, please help me find my way home, and I poured Inna’s moon water on my feet.

Sometimes my improvised rituals are funny and fun, sometimes they are a kind of performance or experiment. I do them laughing, wondering, playing, full of awe. They’ve settled in and just become part of my sense-making in a nonsense world. I see them rising up before me, a possibility. I make sure I’m safe, and then go to where I’m asked to be. I’ve just accepted it, and I won’t keep re-litigating it for the judgemental chorus in my head. This is always how I’ve made up my dance with the world, or this is how it dances with me. I was tempted to say ‘the spirit world’ but that’s not quite right. I don’t feel like there’s a hidden secret dimension of spirit that I can unlock or enter with the right gestures, or not exactly. It feels more like seeing the world as it really is. The All world. It’s right here. The possibility of leaning into the wind and saying hello, or anointing rocks in the garden or laughing and drinking leafy water with little kids is all as likely as anything else. As I wrote that sentence a small sturdy body, five and a half and all confidence, went running past in her underwear with a pile of different swimsuits thrown over her shoulder like a purse yelling “Goooood morning!!” and that was a spell, too. 

I found out my little sister was pregnant the day after I learned I had cancer and she came up to visit for a week before my surgery and we spent a week gently paddling around and floating in time together, while inside of us cells rapidly multiplied. At night, of course, sometimes the panic took me like drowning and I held onto Marc like a life raft whispering "Get it out me, get it out of me."

On July 24th I had a bilateral mastectomy - that's both sides. One side was cancer-ridden and the scalpels ran deep. I also had a series of lymph nodes removed from my left side. I had tissue expanders - thick awkward empty plastic bags - placed under my skin which would be slowly inflated with salt water over months until, after the cancer is fully and finally cut and gouged and poisoned and burnt out of me, some months in the future from now, I will return for another surgery and the expanders will be replaced with "gummy bear" implants - silcone formed with crossed polymers so that if burst or cut all the silicone stays in place, like a gummy bear.

I wrote about this choice on social media:

"If you had asked me before, when it was theoretical, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d have chosen implants but when it came time I knew for sure I wanted to come through the other side of this with these parts of me. Suddenly, the fight for gender-affirming surgery became very real for me, in my body."

I wanted to hold the weight of my breasts in my hands again after cancer, I wanted my symmetry, I just knew in my body that if I came out the other side without my breasts it would leave a pit of grief in me, it would eat away at my mental health, I would take them even if they were plastic, even if it hurt. I don’t know exactly how to explain it but if you’ve ever had to listen to a voice inside your body yelling that it knew who it was than I know you understand. 

The weeks after surgery were like being held underwater. Sometimes surfacing. Time passing in the fast slow way of pain. Plastic drains buried deep within my chest dripped all day and Marc and May took a kind of pleasure in being the ones to lovingly check and gently empty them, marking their contents and clarity every day, celebrating the tide receding. May is not afraid.

She taught herself to swim during our Cancer season. One day she was in that water telling us "look look I'm doing it" but she wasn't, and I said something like: "You're jumping up and down and kicking like a champ but staying in one place. You won't be swimming until you can move across the water without putting your feet down. You'll be swimming when all your muscles figure out how to keep moving together to stay afloat. But honestly, it doesn't matter what we think, whether we believe you’re swimming or not. What matters is that you will know. And that you're doing your best." And a minute later she swam. And then she turned into a fish.

On the Monday after surgery, I surfaced for my first follow-up visit with the plastics team. They asked how I was feeling and I told them that, aside from the pain in a tight line across the chest where I had been cut open; aside from the feeling of ache and collapse and dysmorphia in my deflated chest and the ache in my back from unconsciously curling around my chest to protect my loss, my bloody emptiness; apart from the surreal agony of feeling stiff plastic under my skin with my fingers, the pain of an underground open wound though the skin itself was numb and might always be; aside from that, the worst part was just feeling just sick.

Time had slurred and stretched in waves of heat, heart palpitations, panic, weepy, a feeling of being ill at ease, my family trying to keep me comfortable with a routine of ice packs and British crime dramas. For that whole first week I felt sick. 

The plastics team was a disconcerting gaggle of young, hot men but they looked at me with deep and gentle compassion, held my hands, and said yes, I'm so sorry. This is so normal and that doesn't make it better and I'm so sorry. What I was feeling, they said, was mostly anesthesia sick and opioid sick, aside from the fundamental identity pain. They said drink all the water you can to get the drugs out of you. Try as soon as you can to stop taking the oxycontin and you will feel better.

Then they said, we're going to do the first filling of the expanders today, not for any cosmetic reason but to help with your healing, to take up some of the space in there so there is less room for fluid to accumulate and become infected. It was about a balance of waters. I closed my eyes and they injected a needle into my dumb flesh and slowly salt water rushed into these new caves I carry, subterranean temples honouring the death that could not take me this time but will eventually. No less sacred for being hidden in plain sight. On the right side injection point I felt nothing. On the left side, where the surgeon had removed more tissue to dig out the tiny roots of cancer taking hold, and where they had reached up into my armpit to cut out the cancerous lymph nodes and also those a row beyond, I felt a screaming shot of lightning. I yelled and they held my hand harder and they kept going and it felt like time collapsing and a black hole opening directly through me. 

It was only a minute but I came out of it in a cold sweat. Filled with deep regret. Why did I choose this disastrous and painful illusion? When microplastics are increasingly associated with cancers, why did I put this hard medical plastic into the bloody open wound above my heart? Am I, as Audre Lorde put it in the introduction to her own Cancer Journals (with a forgiveness that almost makes it worse) a "woman who has chosen the path of prosthesis, of silence and invisibility"? Should I have worn my empty spaces like a refusal to be normal, obedient, woman-shaped? Should I have been more brave and let my refigured body help me scream my rage at the polluting systems that are accomplices to this ancient disease? I'm still carrying these doubts, all these new opportunities for shame. The surgery is not the only reason I moved like a caved-in person for all those early days. 

The night before the first time the expanders were filled I had a panic attack and felt the screaming aching weirdness of hard plastic curling up below my collarbones, saw it in me reaching for my throat, and Marc held my again while I sobbed my new litany, "get it out of me, get it out of me, get it out of me."

But the next day, as we walked away from the hospital, maybe 20 minutes after getting the saline pushed into the empty spaces of my chest wall for that first time, Marc made me laugh, he's good at that, and as we hustled across a busy intersection to get to our parked car he looked at me funny and said, "You're night and day right now. You look like you feel better." And I stood still. I felt my feet steady beneath me as the rivers of cars and people eddied past, and I realized some core aspect of my balance had been returned. I was taller. The hollowed-out caves of my chest were filled with just a little water, and it had uncurled me, opened me, lifted me a few milimeters towards a remembered body harmony and, Lorde forgive me, it was a gift.

In the following days, before I was allowed to shower, the climate tipped past record heat day after day and the West blazed and ancient rivers ran dry. Jasper Alberta, which had seemed like one of those old colonial gems, wounds in the heart of native lands, treasures to generations of settlers: the kind of place that people in power would always manage to save, burned to the ground. Conservative minister Danielle Smith, who had gutted the fire department, wept at the press conference for the lost tourism dollars, then went on to gut the province’s health care system. And I sat at the water's edge by a small ancient lake in the East watching the reddened sky, while first my brother-in-law’s girlfriend Sarah, and then my neighbour Isabelle and her daughter Juliette, and then a few days later my mother Sheryl, washed and braided my hair. I wasn’t allowed to get my bandages wet, I wasn’t able to lift my arms. I couldn't find any kind of words for what it meant to me, it gave me back everything I believe to be hopeful and good in the whole world. Pouring jug after jug of cold water over my burning itchy scalp that crawled with heat wave sweat, and with my night terrors also, the water ran under my bare feet and back down to the lake.

Lorde wrote:

"That two week period of time seems like an age to me now, because so many different changes passed through me. Actually the course of my psychic and physical convalescence moved quite quickly.

I do not know why. I do know that there was a tremendous amount of love and support flowing into me from the women around me, and it felt like being bathed in a continuous tide of positive energies, even when sometimes I wanted a bit of negative silence to complement the pain inside of me.

But support will always have a special and vividly erotic set of image/meanings for me now, one of which is floating upon a sea within a ring of women like warm bubbles keeping me afloat upon the surface of that sea. I can feel the texture of inviting water just beneath their eyes, and do not fear it. It is the sweet smell of their breath and laughter and voices calling my name that gives me volition, helps me remember I want to turn away from looking down. These images flow quickly, the tangible floods of energy rolling off these women toward me that I converted into power to heal myself.

There is so much false spirituality around us these days, calling itself goddess-worship or “the way.” It is false because too cheaply bought and little understood, but most of all because it does not lend, but rather saps, that energy we need to do our work. So when an example of the real power of healing love comes along such as this one, it is difficult to use the same words to talk about it...” (40)

I see "a ring of women like warm bubbles keeping me afloat" when I start to feel like I am drowning, and I feel their hands in my hair. I feel the weight of water sitting above my heart, how it came washing over me, and flooding in, and I uncurled a little, stood taller, and my parts remembered something about myself alive. 

It’s difficult to talk about it, but what matters is that you know, I whisper to May, and to myself. 

The days will continue to crash on us relentlessly like waves, and we’ll make choices and mistakes and do our best. And one day your body parts will figure out how to all move together again, and on that day you’ll fly across the water. 

And one day our body parts will figure out how to all move together again, and on that day we’ll fly across the water. 

Blessed Fucking Be.